In April 2009, a new line management of our team at Novartis asked for a new internal scientific information tool. The specification was something like “PubMed … but much better!”
(PubMed is a public search engine for bio-medical scientific literature, provided by none other than the US National Institutes of Health)
The whole team met the spontaneous challenge, which came on top of concurrent pressure regarding resources as well as a quite high basic load regarding obligatory standard deliveries.
I am still proud that I had the opportunity to be part of a real success story. After only 7 months for development and implementation we provided “iFind – the Novartis PubMed+” in December 2009. This great achievement was the result of a fantastic and highly motivated multidisciplinary team. And, by the way, the first time I had been exposed to and could practice agile methodology (here: SCRUM).
My role with the development of iFind was to initially provide a vision … and subsequently more detailed specifications (URS), which met the needs of business and users. In parallel, I evaluated reasonable literature data sources for iFind. And I also contributed to the innovative usability concept and screen design of the iFind literature search & analysis tool.
iFind highlights:
- easy-to-use (also for non-information professionals)
- live visualization of number of hits (“numeric volume indicator”), immediately showing how changes to search strategy impact search results
- 1-click access to full-texts
- Novartis drug name thesaurus automatically including all kinds of synonyms
- innovative and dynamic results view, various sorting and export options
- open interfaces, allowing to complement the constricted PubMed content with any suitable internal or external data sources
- daily updates
- powerful infrastructure which serves Novartis business units worldwide and 24/7
| CLIENT: Novartis Pharma AG (as an Novartis employee) | PROJECT TIME FRAME: April – December 2009 |
