Because the pharmaceutical industry's core mission is developing novel therapies to maintain health and wellness, innovation has always been a key value of the pharmaceutical industry. Information technology is certainly an enabler of that innovation. But with IT costs ballooning, companies must now look for creative ways to reduce this burden.

This includes rethinking the need to own non-strategic IT functions. If your basic IT support and infrastructure functions do not differentiate you from the competition, perhaps there is no need to own them. An effective outsourcing contract not only reduces costs, but perhaps more importantly converts fixed cost to variable costs. This increases business agility as one can scale services as the needs of your company change.

It only takes a bit of imagination to develop many examples of where this model could apply in the pharmaceutical industry. Few such shared services exist specifically for the industry today, but this creates an opportunity for visionary industry participants to participate in their creation, and perhaps participate in selling a best-practice BPU solution back into the market. Ultimately, the entire life sciences industry can benefit from the lower costs and more consistent results this advanced form of outsourcing provides.