Welcome to Novartis

The laptop was the first sign.

Jeff walked in the room, saw my Mac­Book Pro, laughed, and sug­ges­ted I might want to hide it. “Oh no”, I thought. “I’m in­ter­view­ing at one of those com­pan­ies that has cor­por­ate-en­forced Win­dows.”

Oh my. Little did I know.

Be­fore I joined No­vartis, I had an ideal­ized set of ex­pect­a­tions about the in­form­a­tion en­vir­on­ment that I would find here. As a big pharma, we’d be de­pend­ent on in­nov­a­tion and tech­no­logy to keep the drug pipeline full, the money flow­ing, and the pa­tient’s needs ad­dressed - and we’d have the re­sources to really tackle the prob­lem. So, I thought, No­vartis must have an in­cred­ibly rich and pro­duct­ive in­form­a­tion space be­hind the fire­wall, be­cause that kind of en­vir­on­ment is ne­ces­sary for us to re­main in busi­ness!

What would I find, I ima­gined?

My list looked some­thing like this:

  • Easy ac­cess to in­form­a­tion - both in­tern­ally across the com­pany, and out­side from the lar­ger re­search world - be­cause it’s at the found­a­tion of re­search today.
  • State-of-the-art ana­lys­is tools that let you dig through the mounds of data that every­one is cre­at­ing.
  • A cul­ture of in­form­a­tion shar­ing, where per­haps the In­tranet would be even more use­ful than the web.
  • Power­ful search tools.
  • Pro­duct­ive cross-or­gan­iz­a­tion col­lab­or­a­tion between cor­por­ate IT, sci­entif­ic IT, and sci­entif­ic in­form­at­ics, be­cause, after all, we all share in the suc­cess of the com­pany.
  • An IT cul­ture of curi­os­ity, ex­plor­a­tion, and pi­lots.
  • Sci­ent­ists, who of­ten dig this kind of thing, al­ways us­ing the latest tech­no­lo­gies to make them­selves both pro­fes­sion­ally and per­son­ally more pro­duct­ive.
  • A barely-con­tained ex­cit­ing chaos of tech­nic­al in­nov­a­tion ac­cel­er­at­ing us past our com­pet­it­ors.

…

Well, ima­gine my sur­prise at where we really are.

Most of the sci­ent­ists and IT folk that I have talked to in NIBR have ex­pressed ex­actly the same thing.

At some point on this blog, I will prob­ably cov­er the top­ic IT Strategy. A strategy is used to define where we need to be in the fu­ture (usu­ally 3-5 years) based on busi­ness pri­or­it­ies and tech­nic­al pos­sib­il­it­ies. Dis­cus­sions of cor­por­ate IT strategy are be­gin­ning, and we’re be­gin­ning to tune the NIBR IT strategy as well.

Mean­while, I know where we should be now - it’s where I thought we would already be. Let’s get there as fast as we can so that the IT strategy can in­deed be reach­ing in­to the fu­ture, where No­vartis needs us to be.