Andy McPhee, data engineering director at AstraZeneca has 40 engineers in hub sites as well as a team of 15 offshore.
Those who are in the hubs are sitting alongside the end users of the data in Sweden, Cambridge and Macclesfield in the UK and Gettysburg in the US, all working using the agile methodology. The two groups create virtual engineering teams that are responsible for everything from data collection through to data visualisation and getting data into the hands of the end users.
McPhee’s data engineers are focusing on either early science or late science, in addition to assisting the enabling units of the organisation.
He explained that early science refers to drug discovery, while late science is about clinical trials and is, therefore, more operational. The enabling units are the back-office functions such as finance, HR, legal, compliance and insurance.
The company faced a serious data challenge in the form of data silos with people creating their own versions of the truth because they did not trust the data in the first place. McPhee said this would happen with clinical data. “Clinical operations would have almost 50 different ways of looking at the same data; so much so that it was easier to go out and find statistics around a clinical trial or study by going to external data sources, than our own internal data. This was a trust piece.”
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