IT Organizations in the Digital Era

THE CHANGING ROLE OF THE CIO
As technology pervades many different
areas of business, CIOs today have a deep
responsibility to ensure that we are making
the right technology decisions for our
organizations to set us on a future-ready
path.
For this reason, the IT organization must be
clear about the business value that any new
technology solution can bring to its business.
The emphasis is very much on the fact that we
are the technology experts, we understand
how our business works and we understand
the pain points and challenges – giving us
the responsibility to bring new technologies
to our business partners with informed
recommendations about when and how to
adopt them.
It is vital, therefore, for us to recognize a
tangible link between technology investments
and the business value that we will derive from
them, as well as being able to demonstrate
this to the organization. Increasingly, we also
have to involve senior stakeholders from the
business to get their support in approving these
investments. This is important because the
purpose of implementing new technologies is
ultimately to support business goals. Business
and IT must develop a true partnership to
achieve this.
Success is ultimately defined by the ability
of senior leadership from both the business
and IT to ensure that the thought process,
governance model and rationale surrounding
technology investments is fully communicated
and embedded across the organization. Our
users must ultimately understand why we made
our decisions and what we hope to achieve as
an organization. We are now in the process of
evaluating and, in some cases, implementing
new technologies – something that we will
continue to do for the foreseeable future.
An additional area that I am interested to explore
further is how to externalize our environment –
whether it is cloud-based Software-as-a-Service
(SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions.
In making these decisions, we must confront
the sensitive question of whether or not to
put our data in infrastructure that we do not
own or control. If we decide to do so then we
must understand the risks and know how to
mitigate them.
CONCLUSION
A landscape of changing technologies and IT
will naturally help our organization evolve and
transform. I prefer the idea of developing our IT
organization as a whole rather than creating an
innovation group alongside a steady state group.
It is important that our teams stay focused on
technologies that we need to support today, but
with a view to new technologies and new roles
that they are going to respectively adopt and
perform tomorrow. Some people will naturally
be more innovation focused and others will
be steady state focused. However, all of them
have a critical role to play in the stability, the
operational integrity, and the future of Novartis.
The more connected we are as a group across
those different priority areas, the stronger we are
as an IT organization, and the stronger we will
be as collaborators within the business at large.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SAM MANTLE is currently the Global Head
of Research & Development (R&D) IT for the
Novartis Group. This includes the General
Medicines, Oncology, Generics, Biosimilars,
Eyecare and Medical Device business units.
During ten years with the company, he has
held multiple functional, technical and
leadership IT responsibilities across the
group, including CIO of the Vaccines &
Diagnostics Division.
Adoption of digital processes and enabling
technologies is Sam’s passion. At Novartis
he is driving multiple initiatives to
revolutionize the R&D space - driving
productivity and enabling innovation to
flourish.
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