The technical side of business

GlaxoSmithKline’s Bill Louv tells Natalie Brandweiner of technology’s role in ensuring successful business solutions, and the responsibility of ensuring the company’s success.

“Technology underpins everything we do, whether it's in discovery, development, manufacturing or any of the commercial organizations”
-Bill Louv, GSK

As CIO of GlaxoSmithKline, Bill Louv is the steward of more than $1.1 billion of IT investments that are made every year by the company. Making sure that the multi-center global pharma company receives a high level of ROI on these investments is Louv's responsibility, for as he explains, "Technology underpins everything we do, whether it's in discovery, development, manufacturing or any of the commercial organizations."

Responsibility

The success of the company and its entire operations are dependent on some form of IT, with the department facing the huge task of leveraging technology to solve business problems. Louv notes that those on his team, working at the interface of  the company's various business operations and technology, do so with a passion in this very applied role. Knowing which new technologies to pursue and how to integrate these into the company's processes is critical. Half of GSK's investment is directed to a central enterprise shared service form of IT, with the other half becoming embedded in all of its different business areas, such as R&D, manufacturing and the vaccine group.

"We don't bring them all together into one prioritization," says Louv. "If you look at R&D, they take advantage of the core plumbing of IT, but they also have a significant amount of money for software that is specific to R&D, and they're prioritizing that against other types of spend within R&D. They are prioritizing it against in-licensing an early phase compound or conducting another clinical trial."

Times are changing, and GSK is quick to note the online presence of its customers and prescribers; like the rest of the world, the number of those in the pharma industry transacting business online is increasing. Louv explains how 80 percent of patients look online for medical information, with an additional 80 percent of doctors stating the internet to now be an absolutely critical component to their practice of medicine. The effects of this on customer focus can only be a good thing.

"Customer focus sounds like an obvious and easy thing, but it's not at all," says Louv, "but the internet and other technology now means we have much more immediate and regular feedback from our customers. It's a big challenge for many reasons, not the least of which is that we're a highly regulated industry. We had a very significant discussion with the Corporate Executive Team, which is the CEO's management team, and the philosophy here is to first of all figure out what serves the patient. Figure out what the right thing is to do for patients and for doctors and then try to do that within the regulations and legal restrictions. If we stay focused on what's right for the patients and the doctors, we will be able to figure out some way to engage them where they want to be engaged, which is in the social media forums, as well as the internet and other electronic forums. For us to be silent in a world where customers are expecting to be able to interact in these ways is not beneficial."

Tailored therapies

Technology's role is extending into all aspects of industry trends. Louv explains its critical role in personalized medicine in the developing or discovering of genetic markers which involves large datasets; large not only in respect to the numbers of observations but also the number of dimensions in each observation. Technology aids the process in understanding which genes are on and off over time under different situations, crunching a vast amount of data.

"We have big investments in both hardware and software that you need for storing all this data, moving it out of storage and into active memory to run mathematical algorithms against them. It's a huge IT challenge to deal with those giant datasets, we're always investing in that area and it's a fast-moving part of IT. This problem is being solved as we speak, and a lot more can be done now with multiple terabyte-sized datasets," he says.

However, implementing this information across the whole R&D process does not come without its challenges, certainly in the importance of maintaining good communication between researchers, external partners and collaborators. Louv notes the problem of data integration, having the data on any particular compound in a multitude of datasets, which often proves difficult for scientists attempting to pull all this data together.

"This is a core problem we've been wrestling with for years, and we'll continue to wrestle with it for many more years. Things are better, but it will always be an interesting challenge. Some of the progress we've made, such as data warehousing, is done because the tools are better. Another thing we are doing is to digitize data earlier; so for example, we have something called the Electronic Lab Notebook, and now all of our early discovery experiments are captured electronically rather than in the old paper notebooks. So if you capture the data earlier, it opens up all kinds of opportunities to share it among the scientists.

"Just like everybody else, we're always looking for ways to leverage search engines, to crawl around the company and to find things, but it's something that we'll continue to wrestle with. The other challenge, the collaboration piece, is different. This is an area where GSK R&D has always been a bit ahead of the competition. Our company scientists have been using collaboration tools and databases for a decade, and using them effectively.

"There  are always new tools and interesting new things to try, and now since so much of R&D has been externalized – that is, so much of R&D is done through partnerships – this collaboration now goes on across the firewall as much as it does within the company, which creates additional challenges for an IT organization.

"We have several projects that change the security philosophy in the company; if you're inside the firewall, you are trusted, and if you're outside the firewall, you are distrusted. That model doesn't work anymore, so what you have to do is go back and your line of defense has to fall back to particular applications or even databases within applications. Whether you're internal or external is no longer thought to be a good indicator of whether you can be trusted or not trusted," explains Louv.

Added to this are the different platform issues caused by the different software needed for research areas. He notes how the problem often becomes a philosophical debate between using integrated platforms or best-of-breed systems. "There are some software companies that offer integrated platforms that cover lots of different processes and activities, but you're always going to be able to find some niche provider who has a better system for some subset of those requirements.

"Some people have the philosophy that for each area you should find the best and then cobble them together. Other people have the philosophy, 'Hey, get an integrated suite, and eliminate all those interfaces, and just follow the 80/20 rule. It's probably going be good enough, and it'll be a lot simpler and a lot cheaper.' We lean toward the latter: we buy integrated platforms and use the 80/20 rule. However, we are by no means doctrinaire about it. Some would say not disciplined, but I would say not doctrinaire. You have to take each case by itself and you don't want to get hung on your own philosophical statements."

Future

Technology as a constantly changing phenomenon is hard to predict, but Louv explains how he assesses the recent trends within what he describes as the turbulent pharma industry in order to move forward in the future, both as a department and a company. "IT is in a fascinating place in that we are a big cost, so there's great interest in lowering our cost," he says.

"At the same time, we're a significant part of every solution that people come up with, whether it's to decrease cost through automation, to drive a new commercial model or a new R&D paradigm, it always requires IT investment. We're in this really challenging era now of whatever we do we have to keep doing, but at a lower cost to liberate money to invest in driving other parts of the company.

"There's some trauma on the organization because on average it's a very exciting and dynamic environment. However it does, of course, mean a disadvantage or pain to people who work on a particular technology or who work in a particular part of the company where those projects are being starved whilst other parts we're growing very fast, and that creates tension, but it's exciting. It's the way you have to do things in order to be successful, but it's not always easy to manage."

He attributes a portion of this to the economic situation; although unsure of the extent, Louv points to the change in attitude toward large capital projects becoming too tough. The technology sphere in general is preparing itself to welcome the arrival of the cloud computing phenomenon, and notes that there are ways to achieve this without a significant outlay of capital.

Cloud computing is set to change the way in which technology is used and the cost benefits that can be leveraged by those companies who use them. As Bill Louv notes, its infiltration into big pharma could be a slow process, but GSK is educated on technology's importance and its responsibility in delivering successful business solutions.

"If you were analyzing a startup company such as a biotech company, a company that's not going to spend any capital on IT if they can help it, you will find them making use of the cloud much more than you'll find in big pharma. We do make use of it: we're moving our entire email, calendar and company intranet portal into the Microsoft data centers. So we're not only moving to their software, we're adopting their online service and this is one that's going to ring the bell all the way around better, faster and cheaper," says Louv.

Bill Louv is CIO of GlaxoSmithKline.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is a form of computing in which scalable and virtualized resources are provided into an internet infrastructure. The creation of the 'cloud' typically incorporates infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS), as well as other technologies that need the internet to provide sufficient services for business applications. Professor Ramnath Chellappa who described it as, "A computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits" was the first to use the term in academia.