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| About Bob O'Hara (ResultWorks) |
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An accomplished senior executive with more than 20 years experience in building and leading organizations including professional services, product management and software development, he has applied his knowledge and expertise in a variety of industries including pharmaceutical, biotechnology, chemical, telecommunications and financial services. Mr. O’Hara has managed organizations, which have provided information technology solutions including clinical informatics, laboratory information management systems (LIMS), chromatography, electronic lab notebooks (ELN), e-procurement and materials management, process and manufacturing management. Mr. O’Hara is managing partner and owner of ResultWorks, a management consulting company providing business process and informatics implementation services to Life Sciences companies.
Prior to co-founding ResultWorks, Mr. O'Hara was Vice President of Product Management at SciQuest, Inc. a software and services company providing e-procurement and materials management solutions to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology research industries. At SciQuest, Mr. O'Hara led the product strategy, product methodology and solution support for all product lines.
At EMAX Solution Partners, a privately held company focused on research materials management, Mr. O'Hara served as Vice President of Operations, Professional Services and Product Management. He evolved the EMAX Solution Implementation Methodology which facilitated a rapid implementation and deployment of solutions. Under his leadership, EMAX transformed from a custom software business to a standard product software business with a structured software/product development life cycle.
While at Hewlett-Packard Company, Mr. O'Hara held various management positions in both the Chemical Analysis Group and the Computer Business Group. With the HP Chemical Analysis Group (now Agilent), Mr. O'Hara was the National Business Manager for LIMS and Chromatography systems where he built a successful consulting services business leveraging a project management methodology approach to all aspects of the business. He developed an analytical instrumentation training business to support the needs of major pharmaceutical and chemical clients. He also held various management roles in the HP Computer Systems Business Group in the professional services operation and the systems support operation. His development in HP stemmed from many diverse client project management engagements across industries and technologies.
Over the last several years, Mr. O’Hara has delivered papers at Pittcon, LabAutomation, Bridging Pharma & IT, LRIG, and various user group meeting. His papers have covered topics on knowledge management, business process analysis, and informatics technologies.
Mr. O’Hara holds a General Management Program certificate from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University and a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Saint Joseph’s University. He completed post-graduate courses in Systems and Computer Science at University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University.
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R&D Knowledge Management – Technology Initiative or Business Fundamental?
Bob O’Hara (Managing Partner and Co-founder, ResultWorks, LLC)
Ask people about knowledge management and the responses are amazingly diverse: an R&D Wiki; a new technology currently being explored; a previous failed corporate initiative; the translational medicine program; the store-all data repository for R&D; the ultimate search engine that can tap the myriad of data repositories. Technology driven responses are the norm. From a corporate perspective, knowledge management might be better defined as the collective information and know-how to carry out the business. How it is done and where knowledge resides depends heavily on the maturity of the organization.
Across the industry from large Pharma to smaller Biotech’s, the way companies manage their knowledge is as varied as a palette. Assessments routinely identify inconsistent processes, informal systems, research by spreadsheet, results documented in MS Office tools, and ultimately data and reports archived in PDF or paper systems. What is knowledge management in this context?
R&D groups operate with defined organizational structures, business processes, and technologies that support them. All three taken together characterize the know-how to carry out the business of R&D. Presumably the organization, business process, and technology have been optimized for any given R&D area. Frequently that is not the case. External drivers change the business. Organizations change as people come and go. Critical changes in either one may require business process changes. Technology that supported the business years ago may be out of date. As the business evolves, know-how evolves often embedded in the people responsible for generating results. Fundamental to an effective business is balancing knowledge and know-how among people, the organization, business processes, and yes, technology.
This presentation will consider knowledge challenges recognized by several R&D Life Sciences clients. Discussion will cover the collaborative cross-functional team approach undertaken to assess their business processes from drug discovery through development. Formal and informal technologies as well as knowledge gaps and redundancies will be identified. The collective business acumen of the team assembled for a Result SessionSM, a facilitated workshop enabling collaboration and decision-making, brought together a future vision and the steps required to get there. The outcome of the initiative was a strategy roadmap which was adopted by the business and became the foundation for guiding R&D knowledge management investments.
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