Keeping the Corporate Heart Beating

CIO Rich Williams has elevated technology from the sidelines to the center of AstraZeneca’s operations. He tells NGP’s Natalie Brandweiner why information is the lifeblood of any organization.

Rich Williams, AstraZeneca's Group CIO, is dramatically changing the role and importance of technology within AstraZeneca, transforming its operation from micro to macro to become the backbone of business infrastructure.

"Within the pharmaceutical industry, information services were traditionally focused on building technologies, managing data centers and developing applications. Our focus, what we call our new IS agenda, is a transformational change to shift the focus from internal operations to delivering business effect through technology, from data collection to knowledge management and intelligence, from a historical role of back office activities to being an integrated part of the business, " Williams says.

Williams has been the group's CIO since 2006, and explains how a background working in the commercial side of the business is behind his push to change technology usage to become an integrated component of the end product: "Whether it's increasing R&D productivity, supply chain efficiency, commercial productivity all the way to how we reach and interact with the patient, if we keep in mind how each step ties in to achieving our business objectives, then we'll make the right technology decisions and build the right capabilities."

Technology, for Williams, is intrinsically linked to AstraZeneca's business strategies. With the company's overall strategy focusing on strengthening its pipeline of new products, reducing product development time and developing new sales and marketing practices, technology plays a pivotal role in providing an outcome that both differentiates AstraZeneca within the marketplace and improves patient health. "If I can make an investment that will improve quality, reduce the time to market or improve compliance to a life-saving medicine as it moves through the R&D cycle, through better analysis of drug usage and efficacy or through better understanding of the needs of physicians and patients then that's tremendous value to our business and the patients we serve," Williams notes.

On a corporate level, investing in a technology that allows for a reduction in overall costs provides AstraZeneca with greater time and resources in which further product R&D can be pursued. "We look at it a number of ways: is the investment in line with our strategic objectives, does it improve our interactions with our customers, and from a financial perspective, does it improve the efficiency of our operations and reduce our costs, given the pressures in the industry?" Williams explains.

Implementation

But how exactly will AstraZeneca actualize this implementation of technology into its business system? Williams' shift of technology's role has been to dramatically change the organization and its infrastructure, as well as increase its use of strategic partnerships.  In July 2007, AstraZeneca expanded its partnership with IBM in a $1.4 billion deal to streamline the company's previously fragmented technological services. The most fundamental impact brought about by this agreement is the standardization and expansion of the infrastructure itself.

"When I walked in the door as CIO there really wasn't anything global about our IS organization; it was all run independently along market and functional lines, with no consistency of operation," Williams says. The rationale behind making a change of this magnitude is that operating the IS organization on a global level drives greater consistency of information flow across the business, and ultimately establishes a more efficient framework in which to achieve business results.

"It's really a fundamental belief that information is the lifeblood of the organization, from the discovery of new chemical entities to ensuring the speed and quality of the drug through the clinical process, to submissions to regulatory agencies all the way to information to the physician and patient regarding the disease, treatment and therapy. Every day that we can shorten the development process moves us one day closer to making a difference in patient health."

The result has been improved knowledge management solutions and a reduction in overall IS spend of 30 percent. The company was recently awarded the BIO-IT Best Practices Grand Prize for its pioneering use of SAFE electronic submissions that provide the FDA earlier access to the product submission for review.

Partnerships

According to Williams, AstraZeneca's strategic partnerships with IBM, BT and Accenture have set new standards for pharmaceutical companies and their use of technology. He points to this shift in the traditional order of service providers and establishing partnership as key to success. "The partnerships we have established have helped transform our internal organization from managing a particular technology or application to shaping the business impact it achieves.  It also shifts their role and raises the bar considerably in our expectations, as they are truly linked into the achievement of our long term success." he says.

IBM's role at AstraZeneca is to provide a global technical infrastructure, linking the entire AstraZeneca organization and producing global results. "It underpins our global services, and creates the foundations by which now we can start operating in a consistent way, which we could not do previously," explains Williams. "The structure we created centers on a concept of 'service effect', where IBM services and capabilities are measured on the business outcome delivered and not on technology alone. This strategy has now been applied with IS partners across the company's business, each managed to delivering the defined business outcome "It comes down to focus, I want the internal team focused on the things that will truly make a difference to our business and to use a small number of partners to deliver support services.  However, these key partners are measured on delivering an outcome - not just on a set of technologies. " 

Acclaim

It is not just the speed of transformation that has hailed Williams' leadership as innovative. He's also been highly acclaimed for his technology investments regarding physician and patient education. As a result, the company has produced pioneering capabilities using the digital environment to reach and educate patients regarding disease education, compliance programs and products.

AstraZeneca's representatives have also benefited by this focus on leveraging technology to its fullest through the use of their unique CRM technologies that delivers product knowledge to physicians in a highly interactive way that is uniquely tailored to the physician and their practice. 

In recognition of his contribution to healthcare, Williams was awarded the IBM Global Public Sector Innovation Leadership Award in 2008, which he describes as a testament to the AstraZeneca IS team and the value and impact each member has had on the business. "Our work to link the organization, to help streamline R&D, and to educate physicians, patients, and caregivers on disease, product and therapy has made a difference in patient health. What more can you ask for as a tangible reminder that what you do every day makes a difference?" 

Transforming the function of technology to incorporate an entire global organization does not come without its challenges, however, and linking a business is challenging - especially one as diverse as AstraZeneca. Added to that are the increasing number of alliances, partnerships and acquisitions, including the recent purchase of Medimmune in 2007.

Previously, operations within the pharmaceutical industry have performed on an internal level; therefore AstraZeneca faces challenges in setting the precedent for third party partnerships and success of global communications. "Historically the pharmaceutical industry has been operating within this hard shell. Everything's been done internally. What we're moving to is one of more of a network model, and I think that adds complexity to the infrastructure - but will dramatically improve our business right across the value chain," Williams explains.

Impact

As CIO, Williams' goal is to increase capabilities, providing AstraZeneca with the ability to operate with any partner or organization to deliver innovative medicines to the marketplace. Above and beyond Williams' predictions of technological advancements in the pharmaceutical industry, he stresses the importance of collaboration, now and in the future. "Collaboration internally and externally is hugely important, and there is potential for major impact across our value chain as so many aspects of our business rely upon the intelligent processing of data from many sources.  Often this can mean linking our internally developed information and collaborating externally to leverage the expertise, and insight externally, wherever it exists," he says.

For example, AstraZeneca, the Karolinska Institute and other academic institutions in the Stockholm Brain Institute, are collaborating in a unique way of combining instrumentation (functional MRI and PET scan images), data analysis, visualization, and modelling and simulation to develop major advancements in understanding the structure and function of the brain in order to develop new drugs by smarter research.

Likewise, AstraZeneca is working with a number of partners to explore alternative methods of meeting customer information expectations from modern-day influences such as social networking or the potential cross-over into the personal technology markets leveraging consumer devices, such as the Apple iPhone, that may provide real time access to personal health information, compliance and health support.

Williams' services to technology and achievements as an innovative information leader can be attributed to his focus on technology not as a collection of wires in a dark cupboard, but on the opportunity that technology creates to drive business value and competitive differentiation. The view of information as an asset and the relentless focus on business outcome has fundamentally transformed the IS organization into a significant business asset - truly a new agenda for a new world.

Richard Williams is Vice President and Group Chief Information Officer of AstraZeneca, responsible for the global information services strategy and operations, including company-wide application development, data management, technology infrastructure, data center operations and telecommunication networks worldwide.  Williams joined the company in 1992, where he was one of the founding members of Astra/Merck, a new joint venture. Prior to the AstraZeneca merger, he was responsible for information systems for Astra Pharmaceuticals in North America.

AstraZeneca key facts

• Active in over 100 countries with growing presence in important emerging markets. corporate office in London UK; major R&D sites in Sweden, the UK and the US.
• More tha 67,000 employees (55 percent in Europe, 30 percent in the Americas and 15 percent in Asia, Africa and Australasia).
• Sales in 2007 totalled $29.6 billion, with an operating profit of $9 billion.
• R&D spend in 2007 totalled more than $5 billion.
• Employs around 13,000 people at 17 principal R&D centres in eight countries.
• Has 29 manufacturing sites in 20 countries.

Broad product portfolio includes: Arimidex (cancer), Crestor (cardiovascular), Nexium (gastrointestinal disease), Seroquel (schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) and Symbicort (asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).