Emerging pharma: Four strategies for CIOs to accelerate and amplify business value creation
By: Nakul Korde and Pawan Parihar
The emerging pharmaceuticals segment has experienced strong sustained growth and success over the past few years. Fueled by a combination of medical breakthroughs as well as increased applications of data, digital and artificial intelligence (AI) in research and development (R&D), supply chain and manufacturing. For many emerging biopharmaceutical startups, technology is at the heart of their existence and value promise, driving further the need for digitization across the value chain and adoption of leaner operating models. This shift has dramatically expanded the remit and opportunity for the value and impact chief information officers (CIOs) can enable for their organizations.
In this article, Pawan Parihar, CIO at Reata Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Nakul Korde, digital and technology Leader at ZS, discuss four strategies that emerging pharma CIOs can employ to drive business value creation.
1. Lead with digital
The CIO should take the front seat in leading the organization towards a digital-first approach. They can do this by proactively bringing ideas and solutions to the business leaders to embed innovative technology, AI and machine learning (ML) enabled solutions to drive process efficiencies and throughput, to ensure higher quality outputs and employee and customer experience.
However, given the explosion in applications of digital across the pharma value chain, it’s important to be realistic and purposeful about what is prioritized. Below are the key digital programs that have consistently proven to be the top value creators for the pharma industry, but it’s important to ensure alignment with the corporate strategy and priorities. To guarantee accountability and financial discipline, digital initiatives should always have value measures defined at the outset and tracked periodically.
Learn more about how these digital programs are helping pharma companies realize value.
An advantage emerging pharma has over its mid and large sized peers, is the tighter integration of the business and technology teams. One element CIOs can capitalize on is to have one team own and oversee both the business and technology roadmap, where appropriate. This can dramatically speed up the initiatives to help realize value and scale.
“At Reata, we worked closely with each business leader to define their digitization goals and roadmap. To ensure transparent cross-functional prioritization, we employed a prioritization framework that allowed us to balance across investments, speed-to-value, scalability and agility,” said Parihar.
“Despite having a small IT team, we were able to successfully execute several large digital transformation initiatives across R&D, supply chain and manufacturing and human resources (HR) all at the same time, by being purposeful on how the business and IT partner on each initiative operates. However, the most important pillar of the success story was the unequivocal trust in the value and promise of digital across the entire leadership team.”
2. Maximize value from data
Digitization not only helps drive time and cost efficiencies, but also provides an excellent opportunity to capture data across the value chain that can aid in making effective business decisions, improving business processes and driving positive outcomes. Setting the mandate for comprehensive data capture across all business processes is just one basic step that needs to be done right. Business’ also need to enable a foundation for building compliant cross-functional data and analytics products, as well as providing user-persona tailored toolkit for streamlining and maximizing information consumption.
“I don’t want data, said no one ever!” Parihar says, reflecting on his data strategy experience. “I would rather have all data available, searchable and compliantly accessible within my organization. However, the two questions I always expect to be answered before any data is sourced — how will the data be used if we have it today and what is the roadmap to expand its use in future?” It is critical for any CIO to constantly encourage teams to expand and elevate the use and value of data within their organization.
There are several successful examples of emerging pharma companies that have leveraged data as a strategic asset and found innovative ways to maximize its value. For example, Moderna has been leveraging a new business model based on its digital-based messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) therapeutics platform, where the company collaborates with other pharma companies to co-develop mRNA drugs and generates revenue in the form of upfront payments and downstream licensing fees. Other prevalent data trends emerging in pharma is the use of digital twins to ensure smooth supply chain, hyper-personalization of patient and provider engagement and digital therapeutics.
With the rise of AI and ML the boundaries on how the value of data can be maximized will continue to be pushed and it will be imperative for CIOs to enable their organization to experiment with and leverage AI to drive further value from the data, with appropriate governance.
3. Smart investments in core capabilities
In today’s macroeconomic environment, budgets are tighter and spending is deeply scrutinized more so than ever before. A digital-first approach may entail a significant upfront IT spend, meaning it will require business justification, rationalization and appropriate cost attribution necessary. Some practical options to consider maximizing the adoption of digital-first approach:
Jumpstart the innovation cycle: In most situations, emerging pharma companies can benefit by adopting and building upon proven industry leading platforms and digital ns AI technology based off the true value realized by early adopters. To put it in simple terms, learn from others and don’t repeat mistakes.
“Having built commercial systems and capabilities from the ground-up in my previous organizations, I knew how involved and arduous it can be. At Reata, we chose to go with ZS’s cloud based ZAIDYNTM intelligent cloud native platform that is designed to support life sciences. The whole process was a breeze, and we were up and running within weeks. We even deployed a mobile app for our chief experience officer (CXO) team, which was the first thing they used every morning to understand how our product was performing. This made my team’s job much easier and focus their time on other critical launch activities,” said Parihar.
Explore joint go-to-market opportunities: Digital enablers, such as ZS, Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, are always looking to build new products and solutions which leverage the latest in digital technology. A partnership with them to co-innovate and co-create can be a win-win for emerging pharma companies.
Outsourcing and managed services: To ensure an organization is ready to adopt a digital-first approach, it is critical to invest in strong enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities, optimize it’s cloud strategy, establish core data which ensures flexible, modular and scalable integration architecture based on application programing interfaces (APIs), microservices, robust cybersecurity and identify key management. Outsourcing and managed services can help accelerate the speed-to-value and lower upfront investments on most of these areas.
4. Hybrid digital talent strategy
To effectively drive a digital-first approach, emerging pharma needs top digital talent. “Unlike our large and mid-size peers, we can’t afford to hire a large team of individual experts, so we look for people that can span the boundaries across data, technology and functional domains,” said Parihar. This talent is rare to find, difficult to recruit and challenging to retain. Which is why a hybrid talent strategy — that involves building and nurturing a strong team that plays on the strengths of the individuals while filling in the gaps through a trusted vendor ecosystem — is critical. “ZS is one of the most valuable and trusted partners that I have enjoyed working with. They have always helped bring both broad and deep data, technology and functional expertise which works alongside my team as if they were an extension of the Reata team,” said Parihar.
For CIOs at emerging pharma who have a lot to accomplish with minimal runway, little resources and even less to no room for chances, a thoughtful consideration of these strategies can help them develop a personalized blueprint for success in their roles and for their organizations.
About the authors
Nakul Korde
Digital and technology leader
ZS
Pawan Parihar
Chief Information Officer
Reata Pharmaceuticals Inc.
