A little over a year ago, I wrote about AstraZeneca’s road to becoming a digital transformation leader. With CIO David Smoley at the helm, the pharmaceutical giant is known to have been an early adopter of many cloud solutions, including Box, Salesforce, and Microsoft Office 365. While Smoley’s cloud-first mentality has helped save a substantial amount of money, of which R&D has been the largest benefactor, he’s also managed to increase employee satisfaction.
In a recent CIO article, it’s clear that Smoley isn’t letting up. He’s created what’s known as a “Digital Center of Excellence,” a group within the $26-billion dollar company that oversees all digital strategy initiatives, whether they’re social, websites, wearables, analytics, or anything else that can be deemed digital. The main objective of the group is to advocate digital as an enterprise-wide strategy.
On how individuals perceive digital, Smoley points out that “people have varying levels of urgency. Some think we have other things to think about and can wait, and others believe we’ll be left behind if we don’t move now.”
In an era in which innovation, speed, and exceeding customer expectations is expected from companies, digital masters like AstraZeneca continue to pull away from the more common “digital dinosaurs” in the life sciences industry.
