How Stakeholder’s Interests Lead to a Data Driven Business

Digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business. (https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/digitalization) Never before has the benefit of digital businesses become as relevant as in the current pandemic crisis. While local grocers, hospitals, and traditional manufacturing are suffering from the worst economic circumstances in a decade, digital businesses like Amazon, Teladoc Health, and Zoom are registering record stock evaluations. The lack of timely transition to new business models has killed industrial juggernauts of the past, like Kodak and Nokia.

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With the raise of machine learning, unprecedented business advantages are given to those who have all their data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. Only recently, Google’s Deepmind has proven superior in predicting potential drug targets through application of their deep convolutional neural networks. (https://deepmind.com/research/open-source/computational-predictions-of-protein-structures-associated-with-COVID-19) With increasing health care offerings supported by Accenture and Mayo clinic, Google Cloud poses a definite threat to established life science companies. Higher management and executives apparently have understood this, as the main mantra and key goal of many lighthouse IT projects in today’s life science companies is about digitalization. Unfortunately, the definition of this term, its imminent impact, and the associated urgency remain often misunderstood and underappreciated by the relevant stakeholders in the companies. These stakeholders are focused on their current business needs, and while they can see some benefit in technology, their real-life problems and stressful schedules prevent them from seeing the large picture. This blog is intended to help those that find themselves wondering how digitalization is to be achieved and what benefit it will bring to their part of the organization.

The first thing to realize is that we are all trying to do our best. Even though friction between different organizations and their respective goals seem inevitable, think about secure data storage from a quality control perspective versus the desire for exploration from a data scientist with hunger for full data access, there is a common destination to be reached. This destination is a new transformed business that results from synchronized innovation in all respective organizational units, focused on solving the current stakeholders needs. In simple terms, if every part of the organization addresses their current challenges and embraces novel technological opportunities, their progress can merge into a unified whole. Regrettably, this is not apparent to all stakeholders, due to an effect a German idiom coins: Not recognizing the forest for it’s disguised by trees.

Let us look at the common challenges of stakeholders in life science businesses that could be solved by today’s technology and think a few steps ahead. If problem A is solved, which problem or opportunity B will present itself. We will see that extrapolating only a few steps will merge all stakeholder interests in the same final outcome, the foundation of a digital business.

As examples, we will put ourselves into the shoes of a Laboratory head, a Quality Control manager, a Regulatory Affairs representative, and a Collaboration manager.