Command centers today have evolved from being war rooms into digital interfaces, which provide a centralized accessibility, monitoring, and control over organizational processes, specific business processes or goals. Command centers help organizations to maintain remote control over a process or business as a whole to ensure that it functions as designed and does not allow an error or problem to continue growing until it blows out of all proportion.
Common to every command center is a centralized hub with three general activities:
- Inputs/inbound communications,
- Processes/situation reports, and
- Outputs/command decisions/progress reports relative to the goals set.
The unified control over the integrated sources offered by a command center helps it meet its common or consistent purpose.
Types of Command Centers
We see many types of command centers around us, for executing different tasks:
- Civil management: Constantly monitors the environment and oversees the central management and control of civil operational functions. Ensures the safety of people and the proper operation of critical government services while adjusting services as required and ensuring proper constant movement.
- Emergency management: In the event of a crisis, directs people, resources, and information, and controls events to avert a crisis/emergency and minimize/avoid impacts should an incident occur. Acts as a central command and control facility in charge of managing emergencies and disaster at strategic levels during critical events while ensuring the continuity of operations. Also serves as a support function to field assets by collecting and analyzing data to develop strategic decisions that protect lives and property by disseminating the information to the related agencies.
- Security Operation Centers: Typically, such a center would be equipped with data processing technology to monitor and control various functions including alarms, doors, and entry barriers, while establishing surveillance over critical information systems and endpoints like databases, servers, domains, web applications, and networks. Serves as a communication hub for security personnel including law enforcement officers, airport customs and various other agencies 24/7/365.
- Tactical Operation Center: This is the command post for law enforcement and military applications. Consisting of multiple integrated platforms that combine data, video, and voice communications networks designed for the tactical environment to provide situational awareness information to the commander and his team, the center guides members in the field and provide tactical support during missions during which they keep track of operational progress and maintain active communications with personnel in the field.
- Network Management: Offer centralized supervision and maintenance of computer, telecommunications, or satellite networks, to serve as the principal respondent for software troubleshooting, software distribution, router updates and domain management in coordination with affiliated networks. The center also troubleshoots software DDoS Attacks, power outages, network failures, and client routing systems. They track issues/failures to their origin and resolve them without delay, ensuring a reliable network.
- Business application management: Keeps critical applications for customer service and business processes available and constantly working as designed.
- Data management: Essential data gets housed in data centers and large computer rooms gets managed and supervised centrally.
Such efficient command centers are designed to centrally control and monitor critical operations as well as ensures the performance of daily operations under various circumstances 24/7/365. Characterized as intensive work environments requiring complex coordination of personnel and processes, they offer various configurations necessary to collect, analyze data, and perform related tasks.
Who needs command centers?
It’s obvious to us that many different sectors trust in the efficacy of command centers to help them execute their mission critical tasks and to reach their goals. Let’s look at the underlying reasons for establishing a command center in any industry or field of operation.
- Insights at scale: We may have a wealth of data, but the data yields no insights, if it is isolated to individual siloes, whereas the ability to integrate all the data offers us insights at scale.
- Keep track of moving parts: Command centers use technology to keep track of a myriad moving parts, to make sure that the original goal is still in focus and any obstacles are being addressed, even as our efforts are directed towards achieving it.
- Little fixes help attain big goal: Command centers help us to keep our eye on the ball and keep us on track to achieve our targeted goal, as we necessarily make small fixes here and there when we are made aware of them in real-time.
- Gain visibility into data: We get dashboards, reports and analytics which enable us to gain clear visibility into the data with actionable insights to minimize the misses, if any as we work to reach our goals.
Clinical Trials need a Command Center too:
Clinical trials are the most expensive part of drug development. As the trials get executed at different locations around the world, pharma companies have limited ability to keep tabs on their management. Embracing digital transformation to streamline operations is the only solution to this problem. Some additional benefits from this include shortened time-to-market, cut costs and enable better, more informed decisions.
If Google has its DeepMind, Novartis has its Sense tower. Big pharma companies of the world are racing after digitization and artificial intelligence to harness the power of big data. GSK and AstraZeneca are closely following the digital strategy of Novartis and hiring away the tech and big data talent to meet their digitization plans. These digital leaders use their digitally enabled capabilities to monitor their worldwide clinical trials in real time. They use technology to integrate data in disparate siloes, improve its quality and use the data to anticipate all problems and hold-ups and to resolve issues as they occur and achieve their ultimate goal of bringing medicines to patients faster.
MaxisIT’s CTOS as a Command Center for Clinical Trials:
The Clinical Trial Oversight System unifies trial data from disparate eClinical systems, to support study planning, clinical data quality, clinical review, patient safety, clinical operations, CRO performance, risk-assessment, portfolio management, compliance, and submission. This data-driven digital transformation acts as a single-source-of-truth data hub, and a complete AI-enabled analytics platform with self-service. From study setup to data ingestion, clinical trial stakeholders can manage clinical development processes with insight into the study conduct and take proactive actions to reduce costs, mitigate risks and ensure compliance.
About MaxisIT
At MaxisIT, we clearly understand strategic priorities within clinical R&D, as we implement solutions for improving Clinical Development Portfolios via an integrated platform-based approach. For over 17 years, MaxisIT’s Clinical Trial Oversight System (CTOS) has been synonymous with timely access to study-specific, standardized and aggregated operational, trial, and patient data, enabling efficient trial oversight. MaxisIT’s platform is a purpose-built solution, which helps the Life Sciences industry by empowering business stakeholders. Our solution optimizes the clinical ecosystem; and enables in-time decision support, continuous monitoring over regulatory compliance, and greater operational efficiency at a measurable rate.
