Transitioning from Traditional to Transformational Managed Services for Life Sciences

Traditionally, Managed Services entailed outsourcing the management of applications, processes, and functions to enhance operational efficiency and reduce costs by minimizing directly employed staff. This approach, providing a sense of security for many firms, including those in the Life Sciences sector, has addressed CIO challenges by ensuring predictable costs, facilitating technology upgrades, and addressing the scarcity of technology talent over the past two decades.

However, the traditional Managed Services model exhibited signs of obsolescence even before the pandemic reshaped priorities and urgency surrounding digital transformation. In the post-pandemic landscape, there is a heightened demand for innovation and a need for the model to evolve in terms of the services and value it delivers. Several factors contribute to the outdated nature of this model:

• The stability and predictability offered by the traditional Managed Services model, while reassuring, have become impediments to innovation for many companies.
• Traditional Managed Services providers lack the incentive to embrace change and, in many cases, are actively discouraged from doing so.
• For Life Sciences companies, the emergence of innovation-friendly cloud-based solutions has brought various benefits but has also introduced a new set of challenges. These challenges primarily manifest as non-compliance issues, leading to increased secondary costs such as non-released stocks, product recalls, production suspensions, and other regulatory risks