Gaule: Give us a brief description of the purpose of the technology approach you are leading and the key society and business changes it addresses.
Holliday: Commercial information technology (CIT) within GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) supports the pharmaceutical business units worldwide outside North America.
The team is around 550 strong and works with external vendors. The group supports the business with operations, enterprise resource planning systems, sales and marketing.
In my area we are supporting a sales force of around 7,000. The increasing challenges facing the pharma and healthcare industry are putting demands on IT to be more responsive to customer requests and to more quickly evaluate and potentially embrace the latest evolving technologies, such as Apple’s iPads.
In response to these challenges and also customer feedback on the agility of the current organisation, a small unit of six people known as CIT lite was established in 2010.
The lite team has a set of guiding principles about the work they undertake to make sure they do not conform to the norm and are governed by an internal board of directors to monitor their activities and provide direction.
Typically they work on short, sharp projects to provide a temporary solution to a problem or to test a new concept. If successful, these ideas may proceed into production. If not they are discarded. All work is time-boxed to avoid overworking a challenge, support for the product is on a best-efforts basis, and the team are not regarded as a way of getting a con-ventional job done quicker.
Gaule: Who is in the team and what partners have you worked with?
Holliday: The team are all recruited internally and have varied skills and experiences – the key thing is to enjoy the technology and have an innovative mindset with a can-do attitude. We see this as a great development opportunity for our staff and rotate individuals on a six-monthly basis.
Gaule: What have been the most challenging stages in the development?
Holliday: There was no challenge initially creating the team as there were many volunteers. Marketing of the team was important in terms of its role and capabilities to the CIT organisation and customers alike, but most important is to keep the team business focused and make sure any work has some form of business sponsorship and is not just technology for technology’s sake. It is accepted there must be some degree of experimentation to keep the team connected with the outside world and to bring ideas back into GSK.
Gaule: What do you do to relax?
Holliday: I enjoy watching sport, particularly football, but also rugby and keeping ft at the gym. I also like going on summer activity holidays and participating in most of what is on offer but have some way to go to master many of them, windsurfng, for example. I also enjoy skiing, spending time around the house with the family and going on walks with our cocker spaniel.
Box: Corven’s Accelerated Global Collaboration
Accelerated Global Collaboration is a new innovative initiative to bring together leading global corporate venturers in a series of programmes to share perspectives on key areas in megatrends, gaining understanding of respective participants focus areas and identify collaboration and joint deals.
The organisations participating in the programme in Europe, the US and China include ARM, BP, Castrol, CG Innovation Partners, DSM, Triangle Ventures, Shell, Syngenta, Unilever and Xstrata.
Programmes involve survey and interview with participating organisations, pre-workshop dinner, workshop rapid introductions, theme content, collaboration round table discussions and actions.
There will also be follow-up theme developments and webinars. Themes currently being developed include:
l Internet everywhere with different sessions focusing on changing customer interaction, big data infrastructure and new devices.
l Sustainability and water treatment with areas of interest including materials, applications, infrastructure and deployment.
l Health and wellness from therapies, devices, changing behaviours and business models.
Many more themes for collaboration will come from the pre-workshop preparation.The Europe programme will be in London with the dinner on October 16 and workshop on October 17. For more details and to join the programme see corporate venturing events at corven.com or contact andrew.gaule@corven.com