About my Novartis blogs

The Short Version

I was the CIO of the No­vartis In­sti­tutes for Bio­Med­ic­al Re­search (NIBR), the Re­search busi­ness unit of No­vartis, from the end of 2006 in­to early 2018. It was an amaz­ing, crazy, chal­len­ging im­pact­ful jour­ney, one for which I will al­ways be grate­ful to No­vartis for en­abling.

While I was there, I blogged in­tern­ally, mak­ing posts avail­able in­side the No­vartis net­work.

Since leav­ing, I’ve been asked oc­ca­sion­ally if I still have “that one blog”. And some­times I want to point someone to one of the ad­vice notes, or one of the sil­li­er rants.

So, I have re-pos­ted a very few of those blogs here, on my per­son­al blog (you can find them all tagged with “nibr-blog” and on that nibr-blog tag page).

To be clear:

  • None of these blogs have any sens­it­ive No­vartis in­form­a­tion.
  • These blogs are not par­tic­u­larly rep­res­ent­at­ive of what was go­ing on in­side NIBR at the time. This is not a his­tory or archive or any­thing like that.
  • This is just the small sub­set of my writ­ing that is use­ful or amus­ing to share ex­tern­ally, more than 10 years after I wrote these.

In oth­er words - these are a very nar­row glimpse in­to the mind of a CIO fo­cused on Dis­cov­ery in Big Pharma in the 2010s, go­ing through com­plex or­gan­iz­a­tion­al chan­gees, di­git­al trans­form­a­tion, and the chal­lenges of rais­ing a fam­ily in today’s so­ci­ety while try­ing not to break too many bones on bikes.

A bit more background on my NIBR blog

I ini­tially star­ted blog­ging be­cause I needed to com­mu­nic­ate with my or­gan­iz­a­tion about what I was learn­ing, what I was plan­ning, and where we were go­ing. I also used email, but email is tran­si­ent, eph­em­er­al, and yet an­oth­er thing in the In­box. I needed to share in­form­a­tion in a way that it could be ref­er­enced over time, in a way that it could be read when someone was in a re­flect­ive mode, and in a way that gave me the room to ex­plore top­ics in long form. So I star­ted blog­ging on some web plat­form we had at the time, just so I had a place that I could post and share links.

I think I was the first ex­ec­ut­ive in No­vartis to blog. Sev­er­al oth­ers did too, in­clud­ing some of the CEOs, with the sup­port of their mar­ket­ing teams, but blog­ging nev­er be­came a widely-used com­mu­nic­a­tion tool.

Writ­ing is my most ef­fect­ive tool for learn­ing what I think. The blog helped me learn so much… what I was think­ing, what was im­port­ant to me, what was im­port­ant to my or­gan­iz­a­tion, what they heard when I com­mu­nic­ated.

I wrote mostly about or­gan­iz­a­tion­al is­sues and top­ics of the mo­ment. Some­times I pos­ted about silly things or my mus­ings about some new tech­no­logy shift. Some­times I took what was go­ing on at No­vartis and ad­ded com­ment­ary or ex­plan­a­tion. Everything I pos­ted was my own writ­ing, al­though I quickly learned to re­view drafts with people who knew what they were talk­ing about…

Over time, the blog be­came one of the things I was known for across the com­pany. I would be stopped in cafet­er­i­as in Basel by sci­ent­ists I’d nev­er met be­fore, who would ask me about my latest cyc­ling trip, or would have ques­tions and sug­ges­tions about IT pro­jects un­der­way. My blogs on how to handle per­form­ance man­age­ment were cir­cu­lated around the en­tire com­pany. I wrote about the chal­lenges of work­ing across timezones, and heard back from seem­ingly half of our em­ploy­ees in Asia. Some of my blogs were com­men­ted on for years. Some were PR dis­asters, in­clud­ing one not­able one that re­quired an apo­lo­get­ic fol­low up. People would join my or­gan­iz­a­tion, read all the blogs I’d writ­ten over the years, and then get in touch with me with ques­tions about some­thing from three years be­fore.

It was pretty amaz­ing, really. When I star­ted, I had no idea it would be that use­ful or im­pact­ful.

My blog­ging was nev­er on a reg­u­lar sched­ule, des­pite my at­tempts to get to that point. I wrote when I needed to, when it felt right. Some years, I was fairly pro­lif­ic. Oth­er years, I would go months without an up­date.

Over my 12 years there, I wrote over 200 blog entries.

Years after leav­ing No­vartis, I am oc­ca­sion­ally asked by former col­leagues about some­thing I wrote there, won­der­ing if I still have the blogs around.

When I left, I asked about tak­ing cop­ies of the blogs spe­cific­ally, and No­vartis was ok with that. There was nev­er any­thing in any of them that is busi­ness- or IP-sens­it­ive. (I nev­er pos­ted about, for ex­ample, tar­gets or deep busi­ness com­pet­i­tion.) How­ever, the vast ma­jor­ity of what I wrote was about No­vartis in­tern­al activ­it­ies and was very spe­cif­ic to what was go­ing on at the time, and is really just not in­ter­est­ing or ap­pro­pri­ate to share out­side No­vartis these years later.

So, for those few things that I’ve been asked about or seem rel­ev­ant, I’ve gone back through the archives and re­pos­ted them here.

The Story Arc

As con­text for these blog entries, here’s a bit more of what was go­ing on dur­ing some of these years.

  • 2007 - We got star­ted. Or­gan­iz­a­tion­al ba­sics for NIBR’s glob­al sci­entif­ic IT group.
  • 2008 - The org defined roadmaps and pro­jects aim­ing to sig­ni­fcantly im­prove the state of Sci­entif­ic IT in NIBR.
  • 2009 - New ap­plic­a­tions, in­fra­struc­ture up­grades, and in­tern­al audits, all go­ing well. We had pos­it­ive re­views of our sci­ence pro­grams.
  • 2010 - We tackled big­ger IT chal­lenges like cross-com­pany col­lab­or­a­tion, the core data found­a­tion for NIBR and star­ted to fo­cus on man­age­ment skills. I broke my col­lar­bone in a bike wreck.
  • 2011 - We helped mod­ern­ize No­vartis by mov­ing to Out­look, made sig­ni­fic­ant sci­entif­ic im­prove­ments, ex­plored eHealth. We re­ceived ma­jor ac­col­ades from NIBR lead­er­ship on the im­pact that NIBR IT had on NIBR.
  • 2012 - Shif­ted from a de­part­ment fo­cus to a cross-NIBR en­ter­prise ap­plic­a­tion fo­cus for more stra­tegic im­pact, and began to ex­pand in­to data sci­ence. And I broke my col­lar­bone again in an­oth­er bike wreck, be­com­ing the source of many jokes in­side No­vartis.
  • 2013 - Budget con­straints began to lim­it pro­ject im­pact as we fo­cused more on cross-NIBR data ini­ti­at­ives.
  • 2014 - No­vartis cent­ral­ized all oth­er IT units, dur­ing which my re­spons­ib­il­it­ies ex­pan­ded to in­clude De­vel­op­ment IT. My Re­search team spent most of their time on pri­or­it­iz­a­tion and cost-re­duc­tion, while stor­age and com­put­ing needs grew ex­po­nen­tially with ima­ging and se­quen­cing data ex­plo­sion.
  • 2015 - I helped launch a mod­ern­iz­a­tion of De­vel­op­ment IT sys­tems, then re­turned to NIBR full-time to fo­cus on the triple chal­lenges of in­creas­ing de­mand, de­creas­ing funds, and or­gan­iz­a­tion­al grid­lock.
  • 2016 - We star­ted to fo­cus on ma­chine learn­ing as a po­ten­tial for chan­ging Dis­cov­ery, while con­tinu­ing to scale back pro­ject ef­forts, and get­ting ser­i­ous about a move to the cloud to ad­dress tech­nic­al debt and in­crease flex­ib­il­ity. I de­veloped a de­bil­it­at­ing spine prob­lem and could barely walk by the end of the year.
  • 2017 - No­vartis got ser­i­ous about Di­git­al. I launched a re­org to ad­dress or­gan­iz­a­tion­al fric­tion and budget real­it­ies. I also had back sur­gery, then slowly re­covered over the course of the year.
  • 2018 - In spring, I resigned to fo­cus on my health re­cov­ery. I walked away hav­ing been through very high highs and some pretty low lows, know­ing that my team had been ex­tremely im­pact­ful for NIBR over the years, but was still fa­cing chal­lenges.

That’s a brief sum­mary, more than enough for the con­text in the blog.

A few years after leav­ing NIBR, I pulled to­geth­er a talk that looks back at the chal­lenges my or­gan­iz­a­tion faced, where we made pro­gress, and where I would do things dif­fer­ently. If you’re in­ter­ested in that talk, let me know.