Forward-thinking informatics

Jennifer Allerton, Chief Information Officer for Roche Pharma shares her thoughts on the importance of informatics in the industry.

Fortunately, we have a good pipeline of drugs at Roche, and we're growing quite rapidly; so for me the main challenge is to support growth while we continue to deliver services at reasonable prices. Over the last five years, we have done that by moving from being a very decentralized IT organization to being a global organization. That means that we have standardised our hardware and the desktop environment and are about to harmonise our architecture and our application environment . We even set up our own internal shared service centres in Madrid and in Warsaw.

A second element of what we do is around supporting change and innovation. The pharmaceutical industry lives or dies by innovation, and our strategic imperative is the development of clinical differentiated medicines that make a difference to people's lives. Innovation is in our life-blood, and information is absolutely fundamental to the whole innovation process of bringing new drugs to market. It can take more than $800 million to bring a new drug to market these days, and providing information that helps finding those drugs which make a difference in people's lives is part of what we can do within IT.

Supporting growth

In terms of the bottom line of the business, we've introduced quite significant productivity gains through globalisation, standardisation and simplification, and introducing business process harmonisation. We’re in the middle of a major programme in Western Europe at the moment, for example, which is reducing the number of SAP systems we run around the world from eighteen to six; it's really about doing our business processes in the same way in each of our different countries across Western Europeand introducing employee and manager self-service so that the people can manage their own data.

On the top line, it's about innovation in the sales and marketing space, how we go to market. Our whole customer base is changing. Traditionally, we've worked very closely with doctors, but there are now a whole range of people that are involved, including patients who want information. The majority of our drugs support people who are suffering with cancer, so for us, ensuring that the patient gets the right information is key. If you're newly diagnosed with cancer, you tend to go to the internet first to be able to find out the challenges, the problems and what are the best treatments. We, therefore, need to make sure that there's good information there.

Internally, within Roche it's about sharing knowledge across the whole organisation; and Roche is unusual within Pharma companies in terms of our business model. Today, we have more than 60 different alliances and collaborations, from biotech to universities to companies. Being able to share information across our whole chain of alliances is a challenge because you want to make sure that the people who are accessing our information are getting the right information at the right time and can only access the information they need..

We do co-marketing deals, for example, with some of our competitors, and we need to share information in terms of sales reps and who they're visiting. Obviously, we don't want them to see certain information, so it's getting that balance right between accessibility and sharing of knowledge .

We've been on a journey for the last five years, coming from local IT departments working in each country around the world independently with no overall visibility of where our investments are going and no overall alignments with key business imperatives, through to an organisation where we've now got a portfolio of projects, a portfolio of investments that we can ensure it aligns behind key business initiatives. It's a steady continual move towards the direction that we set.

Advantages of globalizing IT

The advantages of globalising IT capabilities are multiple. First of all we get the visibility of where we're making our investments so we can make sure that we've optimized our whole application development portfolio behind the key business initiatives. It's about efficiency gains because we are now getting the economy of scale across the organization that we weren't able to get before. It's about agility in terms of our overall pool of people. We know what their skills are, and we can actually engage them in global projects; so for example, we were implementing SAP in China and Pakistan recently, which is run out of our data centre in Australia, and we put together a multi-national team including people from Brazil on that team because they were the best ones that could do the implementation. We wouldn't have known in the old world who had got the talent and the skills, where they were and if they could contribute. Now we've got that visibility, and we can put together quickly multi-national teams to be able to address issues as they arise.

It's also about global talent management. It's about making sure that we have good development plans in place for those people around the world. If you're working in a relatively small IT shop with say 10, 15 people, your career options are quite limited; but if you're working as part of a global organization, part of a global team, then you can work on global projects, you can have international mobility if that's what you want, and it opens up the scope and scale of your career opportunities, and people really appreciate that.

Cross-company communication

The foundation beneath all cross-company communication and knowledge sharing is that you have to have a clearly articulated and agreed enterprise architecture. You have to know what your application architecture is, you have to know what your information architecture is, you have to have an underpinning technology architecture, and above all you have to have a security architecture to keep the assets safe. The development and agreement of one enterprise architecture is fundamental to it, and that really supports the collaboration with our partner companies.

We need to make sure that the infrastructure supports the seamless exchange of information for those people who are working globally; and therefore, in a sense we get technology out of the way. If you need to communicate with somebody, you can do it in multiple ways. The technology is not the issue anymore; you really need to make it intuitive and easy to do. Within our internal collaboration environment, we've got a pretty extensive intranet, and we really turn data from the initial trial all the way to information, which supports our clinically differentiated medicines in the market.

Outsourcing

We've actually outsourced very little as a company. Outsourcing is rather complex, and if you do it poorly, you can actually leave an organization in a worse position than you are in an insourced environment. That's why we've been quite conservative about it. We've done a few things; we've outsourced for example, a help desk in the US that's contracted with Siemens, and we have file and print management services contracted with Hewlett Packard. But it's very much the exception rather than the rule.

The Shared Service Centres in Madrid and Warsaw are our own people. We recruited them in sites close to our businesses in those countries, and we were able to leverage our global presence and attract really good employees in those two countries. Within Madrid, we set up our Global Engineering and Technical Services Group, and in Warsaw, we have our Global Applications Development Group. They're all Roche employees, and because we've been growing as an organization, it's meant that we've been able to manage that growth without significantly impacting numbers in the rest of the world.

In Madrid, with our Global Engineering and Technical Services Group, it was a great opportunity to rethink our whole architecture. In the past, we tended to think about technical architecture in terms of our data centres, in terms of our network and in terms of services. By starting with a green field, it allowed us to think holistically about our strategy for infrastructure, and we've been able to do some really good work in terms of what we will be doing from a technology point of view over the next two to three years.

In Warsaw, it certainly exceeded our expectations. We found that the highly talented people with good language skills and a good university education who are hard workers and generally superb, and we will continue to expand and grow both sites.

Data protection

It's hugely important for a healthcare company to protect data - protecting patient data is fundamental for what we do. Security is therefore one of our key focus areas. We have to make sure that data is not misused or lost, and to do that we have to make sure we've got a solid framework in place. We have security guidelines, directives and policies, and that includes a list of banned software that people can't use – file sharing software, for example – because that opens up the infrastructure to worms, viruses and so on and so forth.

We have a security architecture, and we actually do quite a lot of security training, e-learning around security training. Every employee has to take an e-learning program, and we run a number of IT security projects at any one time. We have been using secure ID tokens, and we're moving over to an identity grid card now and to be able to respond to the increasing threat of malicious attacks, we have what's called our Informatics Security Attack Response Team; and they are mandated to be able to do what is necessary to ensure that our data is protected. That's worked pretty well; we've had no major business disruptions because of that, and in this day and age, that's a good place to be.

Hopes for the future

In the future will be focusing on the continual drive towards being a strategic business partner rather than just a service provider. It's having a seat at the table in terms of the development of the overall business strategy, and it's the perception that our core competence is the application of technology to the pharmaceutical business. We need to understand the technology and it's that continual drive to get both collaboration and integration, which I think will continue over the next five years.