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May 28, 2002

The Rise of Business Informatics

The life sciences industry operates on an "information-first" model that will soon be common to all businesses

by Justin Kestelyn

In his 1999 book The Touchstone of Life (Oxford University Press), physiologist Werner R. Loewenstein argues that information flow, not energy, is the "prime mover" of life. In his view, this cycle of information is what prevents organisms from succumbing to "disorganizing pressures" in their environment that would otherwise grind them into a quivering, gelatinous mass.

The relatively new field of bioinformatics, of course, is the set of computer-based analytic techniques practiced by biotech and pharmaceutical companies to track these cycles, understand them, and harvest that newly found knowledge for highly accelerated product development. Indeed, in the life sciences industry, it's clear that the quality of this bioinformatics effort distinguishes one competitor from another.

Sound familiar? It should. This model, which assumes that an organization is only as good as its information, that information is the end result of a carefully crafted, technology-driven process, and that often requires application specialists and IT specialists to work closely together, will soon govern the entirety of business. In fact, it's a model that we frequently identify with an "intelligent enterprise."

Read closely, because the challenges faced by life sciences companies as they execute this model will be precisely the ones that your company will face imminently — if it doesn't already.

Cracking the Code

First of all, life sciences researchers have an almost surrealistic amount of data with which to contend: The amount of public DNA sequencing data doubles nearly every year, and raw files containing the complete DNA of a single human being would require 300 terabytes of storage. Often, bioinformatics databases reach tens of terabytes in size and push the processing limits of the most muscular parallel systems. And because no work can occur without these databases in service, system availability is business-critical.

Second, the bioinformatics process inherently involves a diverse data set that comprises scientific, financial, marketing, and regulatory information, much of which can live in specialized formats. All this information must be easily accessible by broad groups of people in multiple locations, so the information management and delivery challenges are frightening.

Third, given the sensitivity of the information involved, data security is paramount. Not only are bioinformatics databases irreplaceable intellectual property, but the data therein is as "personally identifying" as it gets — credit card histories pale in comparison to medical propensities in the consumer privacy hierarchy.

Last, because their needs are so intensely technology driven, bioinformaticians and IT executives must cooperate closely to carefully align research and development requirements with IT resources. Companies that fail to do so can easily end up with stove-piped, redundant architecture. The problems are just too complex to approach from anywhere but an enterprise angle.

The issues I've described are hardly unique to the life sciences industry. We're all heading toward the same destination; it's simply a matter of when we'll arrive. Indeed, business informatics — just substitute "business DNA" (the value chain) for the human variety — will soon be the norm.

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The Next Evolution

The IT solutions vendors have leaped into bioinformatics, and for good reason: IDC estimates that IT spending in the life sciences industry will reach $38 billion in 2006. SAS Institute, Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Compaq have healthy life sciences business units (SAS's iBiomatics division promotes "intelligent" practices in the pharmaceutical industry), and Oracle touts Oracle9i Real Application Clusters as an answer to the crushing scalability demands I described earlier.

Significantly, both IBM and Oracle are reportedly working to leverage bioinformatics-related techniques for customers in other vertical markets. That's because they recognize that business informatics will soon shape the competitive differences among their customers. Yes, information is the touchstone of business success.