Introducing Coco Pharmaceuticals

Coco Pharmaceuticals (CocoP) is a fictitious organization that is used by the Egeria team to illustrate different open metadata and governance scenarios.

This company is vertical integrated, with its own research, manufacturing, sales and distribution services. Its business model is focus on supplying unique targeted medication for cancer suffers. In recent years, their focus has been in personalised medicine - where a patient’s genome is used to determine the right course of treatment. This has created a massive growth in the amount and the sensitivity of the data they hold.

Coco Pharmaceuticals has research partnerships with universities in order to collaborate on further research.

History

The company has grown from a small group of researchers working together in a spirit of open communication, collaboration and trust to a medium-sized successful pharmaceutical company that has a small range of very successful drugs in the market and many others in development – three of which look very promising.

Their investment in IT had traditionally been focused on the automation of the manufacturing process due to the growth in demand for their most successful drugs. However, a recent attempted fraud in their supplier network sparked a company-wide investigation into their operations. The result was the appointment of Jules Keeper as their Chief Data Officer (CDO). Jules’ mission is to improve the organization’s protection, management and use of data.

Jules instigated a company-wide data strategy focused on “better data for everyone”. This was underpinned by an data governance program that ensured their regulatory compliance as well as providing for data management, protection and access.

Through Jules’ influence:

• Faith Broker, their HR director, was also appointed as their Privacy Officer.
• Ivor Padlock, their security officer was teamed up with Gary Geeke, their IT infrastructure expert to be responsible for cyber security.
• Erin Overview, their IT Architect, was given greater prominence in the organization since her deep expertise is in information architecture. She was able then to get some investment in master data management, a data lake for the researchers and metadata management tools.
• Individuals throughout the business were appointed as data owners. For example, Tom Tally from Finance was appointed the data owner of the accounts data, and Tessa Tube, a Lead Researcher, became the data owner for their clinical research data.
• Jules also appointed data stewards for critical data sets. Tanya Tidie, their clinical records clark, became a data steward for all patient records maintained during clinical trials.

The scenarios

The scenarios follow the Coco Pharmaceutical personas as they work to set up their new roles and meet the challenges their new responsibilities bring. Examples include:

• Defining the data strategy
• Setting up the data governance program
• Investigating suspicious activity
• Receiving patient data from a hospital
• Developing a new digital service using personal data

More information

• Detailed descriptions of the personas
• Roles verses Personas

Return to Guidance on Governance.

License: CC BY 4.0, Copyright Contributors to the ODPi Egeria project.