The Big Interview: Novartis CTO Elizabeth Theophille

“One of our significant focuses for the future 4-6 a long time will be to refresh our SAP landscape which will demand a comprehensive overhaul…”

Pharmaceuticals’ instant in the sunshine arguably arrived with COVID-19, when an sector frequently demonised as “Big Pharma” started out attracting broader recognition as a genuinely ground breaking one that is central to battling to the pandemic and one which will be at the heart of responding to any other future general public health and fitness crises.

Pharma has drawn fresh interest from those working in the tech sector as a result. The notion of marrying an mental obstacle with a social good — reverse engineering a pc virus, and executing the exact same to a authentic virus to discover ways in which to restore a program to health and fitness is among the the noticeable parallels — appears to have struck a chord across the tech planet a little something born out by recent surveys. (The point that it is a hugely profitable sector capable to remunerate talent very well may well also assistance.)

That shift in general public sentiment was tidily captured in a study of 2,five hundred technology pros — in China, Germany, India, the United kingdom, and the US — by Switzerland’s Novartis, done in May well and June 2020: this discovered that seventy two{ae9868201ea352e02dded42c9f03788806ac4deebecf3e725332939dc9b357ad} of tech pros are much more most likely to look at pharma for their future task when compared to 6 months in the past. (The study also prompt that healthcare and prescribed drugs had been now much more than twice as beautiful as fiscal companies, telecoms and production to tech talent.)

Novartis CTO: “We’re all fishing in the exact same pond”

They are wanted: across the sector, enormous get the job done is underway to innovate: as Bertrand Bodson, CDO of Novartis, places it: “COVID-19 has caused a seismic shift in the adoption and scaling of electronic technologies in our sector, at a tempo never viewed before.”

Novartis’ Elizabeth Theophille, Head of Technology, Architecture and Electronic (a de facto CTO job) is among the those who created the shift from other sectors. Formerly Team CIO at Nokia, she admits she realized tiny about pharma when she joined the organization: “I was in all probability some of the initially tranches when Novartis had been hunting for tech specialists that never experienced a healthcare background”, she explained to Personal computer Organization Evaluate in a connect with.

“We’re becoming much more open to discover talent from other industries, due to the fact we’re all fishing in the exact same pond when it comes to getting good persons: engineers, details experts persons that can create and architect cloud options and assistance organization transformation.”

Speaking from Paris, she painted a photo of a diverse workforce at the organization, working on numerous overlapping details science, automation and cloud engineering problems: “I have a workforce of about three hundred associates. I have a big workforce of architects I have a workforce of details experts I have a workforce of automation specialists: a myriad of techniques across my organization – and they arrive from diverse backgrounds as very well.”

Cloud-driven innovation 

It is a significant changeover for an sector lengthy-viewed as deeply conservative and hazard averse. Element of that shift has arrive with an raising openness to the cloud, which has served crack down inner siloes and decrease technological credit card debt, she indicates.

As CTO, Theophille notes: “I am also leading the architecture, design and create of the ‘Novartis Enterprise Data and Analytics Platform’ which is a multi-cloud platform driven by AWS & Azure.  This platform will maintain our broad quantities of details across Novartis that the organization will use for new insights and decisions…”)

“I believe a significant transformation has been close to using cloud System-as-a-Provider (PaaS) to create new options we could genuinely start to get improved insights and conclusions from the details that we set on the cloud, regardless of whether that was professional details, internet marketing details, clinical trials and so on. We have also been building a large amount much more purchaser expertise apps on the cloud. There has been a significant modify in state of mind [at Novartis] close to sharing details at an company level, in its place of preserving that on your personal committed server. There is a large amount much more believe in in in how we collaborate as an organisation.”

New (as of 2018) Novartis CEO Vasant Narasimhan has been vocal on this, and the have to have to make better use of details. The company’s 2019 annual report [pdf] captured some of his pondering, along with the point that the organization has now collected close to two million client a long time of details by clinical trials alone.

As Narasimhan observed: “We’re having actions to make the most of this strategic asset. In 2019, we expanded and released important details and electronic initiatives even though forming new collaborations to augment our increasing inner abilities.”

He included: “We’re integrating massive quantities of details that beforehand existed in silos inside of and outdoors the organization and having a holistic search at it. The details ranges from photos of cells that have been dealt with with diverse chemical compounds, to blood samples from clients analyzed inside clinical trials. We’re using machine finding out and artificial intelligence to mine the built-in, anonymized details for connections and patterns that are indiscernible to the human mind. Our details experts are building versions and apps that will empower Novartis teams to talk to new issues, make improved predictions and save time. We can use the platform to prioritize drug targets, discover improvement opportunities for compounds, and much more.

Novartis CTO: Offer chain setting up is a increasing part of the job

“To make acquiring of routine provides much more effective, we are standardizing technical specs and consolidating suppliers. The case in point of laboratory gloves illustrates our development: We went from a hundred diverse forms of laboratory gloves around the globe to just 14, and from 55 suppliers to one, preserving USD .six million. We are also building a databases to give a much more complete see of our purchasing and are commencing to use details analytics to assistance us improved control what we invest in, when and from whom.”

Which is a significant concentration for CTO Elizabeth Theophille, who explained to us: “I have a significant concentration proper now on how we do demand setting up for source chain how we search at our interactions with HCPs (healthcare pros) and the expertise that they get, in particular when they sign up for Novartis gatherings. I also search at how we simplify the way we control material from a electronic asset administration perspective and how we approve all of our components that commercially get prolonged to HCPs. And I’m just hunting at how we can use technology and organization system to to modify the way we get the job done.”

“We have robots alive and kicking”

This incorporates overhauling the finance functionality: “We have started out to create robots using Microsoft Azure: using this to really convey with each other software package automation and to simplify several of the complicated procedures that we have at Novartis.

“We have robots stay alive and kicking at Novartis – most of them are executing a large amount of automation in our fiscal companies space. We have also automated the pharmacovigilance procedures where, you know, we have to report adverse events”

What’s the significant pending job then?

“Every year we critique our Technology Outlooks based on the organization approach and new rising tech. In my job I personal Technology Refresh and examine new rising technology.  Just one of our significant focuses for the future 4 – six a long time will be to refresh our SAP landscape which will demand a comprehensive overhaul in organization system transformation, technology upgrades and new ways of working…”

(CTOs and CIOs globally will recognise the problems that can arrive with this — and the temptation to depart it to very last in big electronic transformation checklist).

“This is an awesome time for the electronic transformation of health and fitness care”, she concludes. “It’s certainly been a remarkable journey in excess of the past handful of a long time. We have invested a major sum of revenue, and [forged] partnerships with Microsoft, AWS and other organisations to assistance us transform using their cloud technology to analyse our details and convey our details with each other and to create details science and AI versions.

“The pharmaceutical sector is completely vital to assistance clients. So it is it is genuinely essential that we get a range of expertise and expertise from other industries that can assistance us speed up this electronic transformation.”

See also: The Major Job interview – Previous GCHQ Director Robert Hannigan