Control Reputational Risk for “Big Pharma”
We were contacted when a major pharma with a drug for flu pandemics had a problem.
They have a duty to collect data on adverse events such as headaches or nausea. A pandemic means adverse events will come in at very large scale and the events reporting system must cope.
They had a fixed deadline and knew their current system would not scale if the anticipated pandemic arrived.
Brief:
Akriga deliver a solution that works at pandemic scale
Client:
Top 10 global pharmaceutical company
Skills:
Interpersonal skills, Java programming, IBM Websphere, Unix, web development
Challenge:
As web developers this is the background to the development task:
- A predicted Pandemic looming.
- Pharmacovigilence (adverse events) reporting is required.
- Budget not an issue but deadline immovable; multi-million dollar brand equity at stake.
- Based on concerns about very high traffic a last minute change from Windows to Unix hosting is called for.
- Complex hosting infrastructure, not a typical LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) setup. Infrastructure maintenance has been outsourced and is not well understood by the client.
- Outsourced hosting company unwilling & unable to help and are several time-zones away.
- No in-house capability available to take this challenge on.
Solution:
- Build a copy of the hosting environment: Unix, IBM WebSphere Application Server deploying Java code. (N.B. IBM calls its webserver IHS Internet Http Server and it is based on Apache 2.0 with some additional patches & the ability to work with the WebSphere administrative console).
- Understand political/management environment as well as technical one.
- Negotiate, build alliances, find showstoppers.
- Write & deploy Java servlet code via corporate release procedures, across different timezones. Release process involves a VPN, FTP, & bash scripts started via SSH.
- Pass corporate security test; 10 000 known exploits unleashed on our code.
- Pass the test, hit the deadline.
Outcomes:
- Company complies with its pharmacovigilence obligations
- Risk to the brand is controlled
- Management time freed up to work on other tasks
- We were invited back to build a wiki for the global marketing team – amongst other projects.