Implementation of data and reporting standards are a critical component to improvise on the Inefficiencies in the collection, processing and analysis of information which in turn drive up the cost of drug development for life sciences, biotech and service provider companies. As part of the standards groups at my company I tend to always see a scope of improvement on continuous basis which can not only cut on the reporting time and delivery time, but also ensure the quality of delivery in a short duration of time.
Two week back my manager sent me a blog post on the Ten Commandments for Effective Standards, While I was waiting at the NY airport trying to catch my flight to a PharmaSUG conference, I reviewed the main ideas presented in the blog.
The 10 commandments while creating technical standards:
- Cooperate on Standards, Compete on Products
- Use Caution When Mixing Patents and Standards
- Know When to Stop
- Be Truly Open
- Realize There Is No Neutral Party
- Leverage Existing Organizations and Proven Processes
- Think Relevance
- Recognize There Is More than One Way to Create Standards
- Start With Contributions, Not From Scratch
- Know That Standards Have Technical and Business Standards
These commandments are from the book of the same name by Karen Bartleson. I think this book is potentially a great reference to a very thoughtful insight which outlines a lot of details on standards development with respect to technical standards.
While reviewing the details in the blog the most aspiring aspect which I can take the most out and adopt to my current work and share the same with my statistics programming group is the commandment 7, which allow us to think in relevance of adopting the standards to the business aspect you get involved and how it can be tied to company goals.