Digital Transformation in Life Sciences, Part Two
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Focus on: Why Cloud for Pharma |
A hallmark of successful technology companies is that they are more comfortable with the idea of reinventing themselves than they are with the idea of staying the same. As our CEO Satya Nadella put it on the first day in his new role “The technology industry does not respect tradition – it only respects innovation”.
By contrast, life sciences companies are often trapped by their history. These companies understand the need to develop new classes of products, provide “beyond the pill” services, maximize the value of real world evidence, build out new manufacturing capabilities, and fully digitize the supply chain. But the people, processes and technology set up over decades to manage risk and maintain profits can result in years of analysis, and an inability to move beyond pockets of innovation.
In my last blog post, I looked in some detail at some of the unique challenges that life sciences companies face as they attempt to transform, and discuss the forces that are ensuring that digital transformation is essential. In this post, I’ll be focusing more on the “how” of digital transformation, building on lessons we have learned from our own transformation, and those of some of our most successful customers and partners, across many different industries.
One useful technique that can be used when beginning the digital transformation journey, is to take a close look at what your company actually does today, fully representing the innovative activities that are already occurring. For many years this was a simple question for life sciences companies to answer – they discovered, developed, manufactured and commercialized pharmaceuticals. But today, a more accurate description of many life sciences companies is that they provide products and services to improve health and wellbeing of individuals and populations.
While on the surface, this seems like a simple reframing and abstracting of activities, it can actually be very powerful. In fact, technology companies do this type of exercise constantly – questioning what they do in the light of change inside and outside of their organization, then changing investments in the company to reflect the new reality. It is for example what has allowed Microsoft to transition from an operating system company, to a software development company, to one of the largest provider of cloud services in the world.
The new life sciences company may focus as much on, for example, software development as the production of small molecule drugs. It is enhancing capabilities in mass customization and is building out the 100% digital supply chain necessary to ensure the safe delivery of personalized therapies. It is bringing products and services to market continuously and may even be producing products and services to market that continuously improve as they are used in the marketplace. And it is expecting disruption from all areas, and if it does not see it, it is creating it. It is, in short, close to being a digital life sciences company.
Another critical part of the equation is how technology choices can either inhibit or facilitate digital transformation. Many technology architectural designs inside life sciences companies today have been built out to support business processes defined decades earlier. The inflexibility of these architectures itself then locks in the businesses process, and inhibits business change. This is exacerbated by the tendency of the industry to prefer “best of breed” technology solutions, tied together by complex integration software. In a recent DIA Webinar that we recorded alongside industry experts from PAREXEL and Allergan, we explored this challenge, and described how technology innovation will allow life sciences organizations get to approval faster.
New flexible technology architectures are typically being built on cloud computing technologies. Cloud computing has been shown in numerous studies over the last five years to increase business growth in organizations that aggressively adopt it. This is hardly surprising. Traditional computing models provide hardware and software that decreases in value the moment you make a purchase – but cloud computing models benefit from continuous investment from the cloud provider, with enhanced performance and new services constantly emerging. Cloud based AI and HPC capabilities make these services ubiquitously available throughout an organization, allowing new products and services to be developed at a pace that was previously unimaginable. And new data architectures are emerging that enable life sciences companies to truly maximize the value of the data they have access to, across the full value chain.
Unsurprisingly, an ecosystem of innovative service providers in the life sciences industry is springing up to take advantage of these cloud capabilities, transforming approaches in everything from drug discovery through to commercialization. A great example is our partner Adents, who are using the Microsoft cloud as a basis for a serialization and traceability solution that is certified to connect to the European hub.
Existing life sciences companies will typically run into challenges in getting full value from these technology changes, usually because they have failed to fully focus on the corresponding changes that are needed to their processes and culture. All three areas – people, process and technology must be re-examined and designed in such a way that they can accommodate change and drive it where appropriate.
Perhaps the most inscrutable piece of the puzzle is cultural change. Figuring out how to instil a growth mindset, in an organization that has been built on managing risk is particularly challenging. But while these are difficult issues, they are absolutely not insurmountable. Microsoft is working on these issues with a number of life sciences companies and CROs, bringing experience from our own digital transformation and data from our work in multiple highly regulated industries. Once the same flexibility and growth characteristics that are inherent in cloud computing infuse the culture of a life sciences company – then it will become a truly digital life sciences company.
