Meeting The Challenge Of Growth In The Pharmaceutical Industry

October 6, 2008

In some ways, Jennifer Allerton, CIO of Hoffman-La Roche, the fifth-largest pharmaceutical company in the world, faces the ultimate data management challenge: collecting, storing, organizing, classifying, and understanding vast amount of research and clinical data-already almost a petabyte and growing at 60% a year. And that's just part of what it takes to support the company's double-digit growth.

Jennifer recently spoke to News@Cisco about the fundamental skill that CIOs facing similar challenges need: managing people and matching their talents to your core competency.

Let's start with some background on the role of IT in the pharmaceutical industry as you see it.

Jennifer Allerton: That can be stated rather simply: IT is the lifeblood of the pharmaceutical business. It takes ten to twelve years to bring a new drug to market, and every step along the way requires collecting, storing, organizing, classifying, and understanding vast amounts of data. At Hoffman-La Roche today we're dealing with nearly a petabyte of data-not just text, but various forms of medical imaging as well-and it's growing at 60 percent per year.

So what are the primary challenges you face as CIO of Hoffman-La Roche?

Jennifer Allerton: I can call out two in particular, but they're so intimately related it's almost artificial to separate them: supporting corporate growth, and improving data management---that is, better supporting our researchers in finding and evaluating new drugs, and our manufacturing divisions in bringing them to market. We have more than doubled our business in the past five years, largely by successfully introducing some very significant drugs, such as Rituxan for rheumatoid arthritis and Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, Avastin for Colo-Rectal Cancer, Herceptin for certain kinds of breast cancer, and, perhaps most famous lately, Tamiflu for flu prevention and treatment.

We want to double again in the next five years. That means getting better and better at managing the data involved in bringing new drugs to market. There's the basic research data up front, then all the data from the various phases of clinical trials, which scale from a dozen or so patients early on to thousands in the later phases of testing. Then there's the data needed to satisfy various regulatory regimes, getting information out to doctors and patients when the drug is released, and finally getting information back from doctors and patients as the drug is used-safety monitoring, which requires being able to spot patterns of adverse reactions as early as possible.

How have you responded to these challenges?

Jennifer Allerton: Over the past five years we've globalized IT by moving away from a decentralized model that was spread across 150 countries. This globalization, which included developing and introducing architectural standards and ITIL-based processes company-wide, has greatly improved our ability to align IT with key business objectives, and has been critical in creating the kind of scalability we need to support the growth that Hoffman La Roche is aiming for.

To do this, we had to build an IT organization that knows how to work globally, virtually, and collaboratively. We set up a whole new career structure and framework for our people, to give them the growth perspective appropriate to a global company. This means opening them to the greater career opportunities available beyond the affiliate they happen to work for in a given country, enabling them to move up internationally. It also means giving them the ability to choose whether they want to stay in a technical role, or move into line or project management, rather than forcing everyone into the same mold.

How do you measure the results of these initiatives?

Jennifer Allerton: The fact that we've been able to support double-digit annual growth for five years is a pretty good metric of success. But we also pay a lot of attention to less tangible results, the people results, and for that we rely on internal surveys and external benchmarks. The latter are executed by Gartner. They compare us both against the average company of our size and complexity, and against the best companies in our class.

Internally, twice a year we execute a customer satisfaction survey. By customer, of course, I mean Hoffman La Roche users of IT services. We want to know if they have the computer systems they need to support their business activities. And we get fabulous results: consistently, more than 90% of our users in Basel for example say that they are satisfied or very satisfied with their computer systems-everyone from line workers to researchers to executives. We also do Employee Engagement surveys with our own IT staff to find out if they're happy and fulfilled in their jobs.

Then, every two years, we have an outside company do intense, in-depth interviews of 50 senior executives company-wide concerning their experience of IT services. Here we probe everything from our performance in simply keeping things running, to our support for product launches, to our strategic role in the business. We just completed our second set of these, and we appear to be moving the dials in the right direction.

For instance, in the previous survey, executives said that dealing with IT was too complicated; it was too hard to figure out to whom one should talk. So we implemented an Account Manager program to give people one point of contact for IT issues. The most recent survey indicates a great deal of satisfaction with that initiative: IT is now perceived as much easier to work with and get results from.

What would be your advice to a fellow CIO facing similar challenges?

Jennifer Allerton: It's pretty simple to state, and hard to do: focus on the business and the people, not the technology. You really have to concentrate on identifying your core competency, what you have to offer the business. In our case, it's the application of information technology to developing, testing, and marketing new drugs and therapies. Find your sweet spot, and then put the right people with the right skills into it. Miracles will happen.