Digital transformation in life sciences

True enterprise digital transformations go above function, brand, and market, and they are focused at the value chain, business unit, therapeutic area, strategic focus (e.g., patient, therapy leadership), enterprise, or ecosystem level. Enterprise digital transformation programs also challenge traditional business models and abandon point digital capabilities for end-to-end, connected digitization across interactions, experiences, insights, and processes.

In a common use case, companies leverage digital transformations to evolve from a transactional model to an insight-driven, value-based organization, where connected digital strategies redefine how they deliver patient care, optimize operations, and enhance market responsiveness. To achieve this state, life sciences companies should leverage enterprise digital transformation to connect and elevate existing digital efforts into a wider enterprise digital strategy and transformation to drive broader business value.

Digital strategy objectives:

• Customer-in-focus models: Drive business strategies and operations from the patient and HCP

• Always-on agility: Rapid, nonlatent responses to planned or unforeseen environmental conditions

• Fully connected community: Enterprise insights from democratized data and a fully connected business

• Intelligent optimization: Management by exception and continually optimized processes enabled by more extensive data (e.g., IoT), intelligent workflow, and human-machine decision-making

• Predictive, holistic, insight-driven analytics: Accelerated and improved insights and decision-making across the enterprise

• Flexible, virtual, unbounded workforce and workplace: Leverage talent wherever it is

No strategic business transformation is easy. While core enterprise transformation mantras hold for digital transformations (e.g., strategy-led, dynamic executive leadership and business-impact focus), there are five key questions life sciences executives should address to successfully define and structure their digital transformation.

1. What is my holistic digital ambition? The strategic business question is what digital transformation strategy fits a company's strategic objectives, financial and competitive needs.

2. How do I value and position a broader digital transformation? Successful companies use a structured digital value model that consists of value, operational performance, and capability plays (and measures).

3. How do I activate my ecosystem to accelerate digital value and realization? Life sciences companies should activate their wider ecosystem to leverage non-traditional approaches to mitigate the four Cs of enterprise transformation challenges: Cash, capacity, competency and control (i.e., risk).

4. How do I structure, mobilize, and align my organization for success? Digital transformations should be structured to meet challenges and mobilize for success – i.e., with the goal of delivering on critical strategic objectives.

5. How do we future-proof our capabilities and become an adaptable organization? Leaders should view digital transformation as an ongoing, enterprise evolution to innovate, engage, and execute more agilely, effectively, and efficiently to build and sustain competitiveness.

The combination of people, experiences, processes, data, and insights, driven by digital technology and delivered in a connected manner for higher business value, is what we call a digital pillar. Digital pillars and their related pivots are a means to propel and focus an organization along its digital journey. The focus of a digital transformation should be defined by choices within, and across, five driving digital transformation pillars.