The question I keep hearing about is ‘how can Life Sciences CIOs help meet the needs of the business at the current pace of technology?’ Last month I wrote about Realizing a 360 degree view of your customer… and a focus on CRM. This described how IT technology can add value in helping the business keep and acquire customers. This month I want to summarize what is impacting today’s executives and what can be done to have IT be an enabler of value within Life Sciences.
The situation today
In the recent Gartner 2012 CIO Agenda “Re-Imaging IT” by Andrew Rowsell-Jones he presents a summary of the results from an extensive CIO survey, and a key question around the relevancy of IT departments when the business has a broader definition of technology.
Many of you reading this blog post experience the rapid pace of technology as you go about your business each day. Technology is reaching more people across the globe consider these points:
- I’ve heard that in China over 70% of the population have never owned a laptop and went straight to handheld devices.
- In India, mobile phones are more popular than toothbrushes
- And other facts about the rapid pace of technology
In the Gartner survey CIOs ranked the following business strategies in order of importance:
- Growth
- New customers
- Reducing IT costs
Yet the Life Sciences industry executives have to deal with little or no growth in IT budget and increasing demands from the business for more technology (especially around analytics and mobility). CIOs are constrained from delivering IT innovation from budget to skilled IT resources to organization and culture plus alignment between IT and the business.
CIO as the Chief Innovation Officer
I had read this Forbes article by Perry Rotella entitled CIO = Chief INNOVATION Officer. The essence of the article was to lay out the case for CIOs to have their organizations adopt more of an ‘agile’ approach to the use of technology within IT. I recognize and experience that Life Sciences companies have to deal with Regulations, Compliance and Security. Yet I believe this to can be solved.
I do agree with Perry in this article that the CIOs “greatest responsibility is to create value” for the organization. You drive ‘growth’ via ‘innovation.’ IT enabled innovation can differentiate how you deliver service for medical devices, offer a great customer experience, and improve the productivity within the organization.
IT Service providers can aid and enable CIOs move to a more ‘agile’ approach to generate IT Innovation. I would suggest the following actions:
- Embrace the fact that your current approach to delivering projects will have shortened lifecycles – full of frequent changes.
- Find IT providers that add value from a solution/technology perspective. Think of them as extensions to your team. This reduces the need to up-skill or hires talent to your IT team.
- Fill the gap within your IT team around new technology with IT service providers that can rapidly add value to key projects.
- CIOs are asking for short ‘assessment’ projects that can diagnose the current process and offer solutions with costs and timelines. I’ve helped companies adjust their supply chain or enact benefits studies around specific business processes.
- Focus on smaller and shorter (in terms of duration) IT projects.
- Proof-of-concept projects in cloud computing. Balancing validation between on-premise and on-demand applications. Yes a ‘hybrid’ model is possible. Remember the previous points and align these projects with the business to meet the greatest value.
In the coming weeks I will address mobility and big data. These are some of the hot topics within
Life Sciences and they can mean different things depending on if you’re a pharmaceutical or medical device company.
Thanks,
Jim