Pharmaceutical companyEli Lillyis putting a research project on the internet for tender in
an effort to become a networked company.
This emerged at the launch of the Jericho Forum's new
Collaboration
Oriented Architectures framework at
RSA on
Thursday.
Speaking at the event, Adrian Seccombe, CISO of Eli Lilly and a
Jericho Forum board member said the move was part of the firm's
attempt to work more collaboratively with suppliers, customers and
patients.
"The chairman of Eli Lilly has said he wants (the company) to
change from being a fully integrated pharmaceutical company to a
fully integrated pharmaceutical network," Seccombe said.
Lilly advertised research topics on the net, and interested
scientists went to a Lilly website to pitch for funds to find an
answer, he said.
"Imagine - a pharma company giving away the intellectual crown
jewels like that," he said. "But it opens up the company to
hundreds and thousands more researchers than we could get to know
directly, and it's proved very effective."
Seccombe said this was an example of how business pressures to
lower cost but gain access to expertise were pushing companies to
use internet-based applications. This was happening in many
industries.
He said the resulting need to share data was breaking down
security barriers between companies and business partners. But many
were worried about how much they could trust the networked
environment. This was the scenario that the forum's COA addressed,
he said.
Paul Simmonds, CISO of UK chemicals maker ICI and a Jericho
board member, said the COA was a framework of people, process and
technology issues that companies needed to address anyway because
of the changing business climate.
Chief among the issues arising was the trust that gave business
partners confidence in the web-enabled transactions that companies
are building, he said.
Seccombe said the internet as a marketplace would be still-born
unless companies could use it with confidence. Growing technical
and social complexity was making it impossible for companies to
continue to trust traditional ways of securing transactions, he
said.
Online business in the US will grow 17% to top £100bn this year,
said a
US National Retail Federation report released this week. But
this was attracting naive users, hackers, regulators and criminals,
as well as state and industrial spies, he said. Unless there was
trust, the full potential of the web would not be realised, and
business costs would soar, Seccombe said.
"We need to move from an economic model based on the stand-alone
enterprise to a collaborative model based on guilds, where
competence is the driving force," he said.
Seccombe and Simmonds said the move in this direction was
already apparent, as the Lilly example showed. More and more
companies were using the internet to give effect to new
partnerships, joint ventures, outsourced and adhoc freelance
relationships with suppliers to lower costs of ownership and/or
access to essential expertise, they said.
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