A New Operating Model to Embed Enterprise Data Management
Project Overview
The need to accelerate the time to market for new drugs while reducing costs is a key priority across life sciences. A robust approach to enterprise data management is critical to achieving this, and as such organisations are taking a more strategic view of data by consolidating tools, eliminating duplication and leveraging opportunities for reuse.
The Data Leadership team of our global life sciences client is responsible for driving an organisation-wide approach to data and reducing data siloes across the decentralised organisation. Despite strong technical offerings, they struggled to fulfil demand for pace of delivery and demonstrate tangible value. To be successful in a noisy data landscape, they needed to drive sustainable change underpinned by strong leaders, people readiness and a data culture, alongside holistic understanding of the broader enterprise data landscape.
After initially supporting one product line, we helped realise an opportunity to eliminate historic product siloes and define a new, cross-product approach to data management to ensure delivery of greater value to the organisation through a holistic and connected offering. This required the development of a new operating model for data teams and significant leadership buy-in and mindset change. As such, our partnership evolved to become the strategic change partner for the product line as a whole, providing people change expertise and hands-on support that empowered the leadership team to transform their ways of working.
Our Solution
- Developed a tailored readiness assessment to identify challenges and ways to address them, underpinning the programme with data-driven insights and common goals.
- Worked with the leadership team to define a compelling vision, visual identity and narrative for the highly technical and complex offering, clearly demonstrating ‘what’s in it for me?’
- Facilitated leadership workshops to drive a mindset shift from tactical to strategic thinking, which resulted in leadership alignment on the new vision statement and enabled the product line leads to secure buy-in from senior stakeholders.
- Delivered a leadership programme through face-to-face working sessions, establishing new ways of working for leaders via common tools, templates and processes and increasing enterprise data management leader visibility across teams.
- Established new business integration roles to more impactfully engage with the business and equipped them with toolkits and best practices.
- Introduced internal communications and All Hands sessions to bring the geographically dispersed technical teams on the operating model journey, driving cross-collaboration.
- We also developed self-service user entry points into the various tools in recognition of the diverse user backgrounds, including the development of a persona-led gSite.
- Leveraged cross-industry experience to co-create a fit-for-purpose operating model, including a new team topology at product line level and new global enabling roles to support the delivery of product line initiatives.
The Differences We Made
“Afiniti seamlessly integrates with our teams, working collaboratively to achieve common objectives. Their ability to listen, adapt and contribute constructively has made them an invaluable partner in our change journey. Afiniti excels in strategic thinking, with a keen ability to align their strategies with our organisational goals, ensuring that our change efforts are not only effective but also sustainable. Their strategic foresight has been instrumental in navigating complex challenges and driving meaningful progress.”
Data Leader, Global Life Sciences Client
- Conducted end-to-end value chain analysis to identify trends in usage and gaps in existing data across an ecosystem of platforms and solutions, revealing specific needs for realising a proactive approach to data collection.
- Enabled the business drivers for transforming to be recognised across the organisation and the sought outcomes understood by senior stakeholders and delivery teams.
- Defined a new, future-ready operating model, team topology and strategy to clarify roles, refine processes, enable scalability and ultimately facilitate delivery of the vision.
- This granted an end-to-end view of product line capabilities and reduced potential role duplication and capability gaps. We worked with leaders to consistently embed the operating model at all levels and phases of delivery.
- Successfully embedded a horizontal leadership culture and product line mindset to drive the new approach to enterprise data management.
Learn more about Afiniti’s enterprise-level life sciences consulting experience here.
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