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P207: Revitalizing Innovation: An Employee-centric Approach to Solution Delivery in an Emerging Value Network

Poster Presenter

Sibel D. Guerler

Head, Innovation, Partnerships & Process Optimization, WorldWide Patient Safety
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company
Switzerland

Objectives

We propose a new operating model with a decentralized approach to supplement the current IT offering to leverage rapidly evolving technologies and skills at the individual level to enable employees to lead the development and delivery of solutions quicker to extract maximum value for the end user.

Method

We created a decentralized team with part-time representation across the safety organization, addressing existing digitalization gaps with a focus on subprocesses. We use an agile approach combined with a mentoring structure to discover, develop, and share different skill sets.

Results

While IT departments’ focus on centralized control drives value optimization and scalability in core systems, end users ultimately define the processes around these systems. This can result in fragmented subprocesses feeding into or branching off the IT-supported main process. End-user empowering technology is evolving fast and with it the standard employee skill set. There is a benefit in utilizing the interconnectivity of software to build custom scripts, programs, micro automation, and unlock additional oversight, examples include Power Automate and Power Apps. Previously vendors would have been contracted to execute the build, adding lead time and complexity. Now, we can leverage and build employee skills in our departments to take the lead in solution delivery to greatly reduce the time to production for smaller-scale projects that would traditionally not add enough value to justify the investment by IT. These can later be used as Proof of Concepts which removes that initial burden and investment that can often terminate a project before it begins. These fast solutions typically result in increased efficiency and are measured in hours saved. Our structure of part-time members from different safety areas working on their own or nearby problems, combined with the central innovation team’s guidance to appropriate methods and technologies, was yielding a positive return on investment already weeks after implementation. Due to their proactivity and proximity to the business needs the team members manage their priorities and projects. The innovation team gathers the project status, value-add, and times to share progress and successes in real time to motivate and inspire other members to join the expanding capability of the network. With increasing automation, team members are becoming competent with handling larger amounts of data and generating insights from it. This serves as a key building block to delivering on the promises offered by AI solutions.

Conclusion

Safety organizations face multiple challenges in managing complex, convoluted, and data-rich processes that involve global and local stakeholders with diverse and dynamic needs. This makes safety organizations an ideal birthplace for the proposed operating model. This model leverages the expertise and motivation of safety employees who are closest to the problems and the end users. It also reduces dependency on IT resources who in turn get to focus on the large core processes. This increases the speed and flexibility of solution delivery. Our proposed model involves four main elements: (1) providing safety employees with access to automation tools and coaching them on how to use them; (2) forming teams of likeminded employees who can collaborate and co-create solutions; (3) supporting these teams with guidance from experts, resources from senior leadership and communication channels for sharing ideas and feedback; and (4) allowing these teams to work adaptively without excessive governance or decision-control. We argue that this model can foster a culture of innovation that matches the employees’ levels and needs and drives business success. By empowering employees to create their solutions, they can enhance their skills in technology, process optimization, communication, and change management, which in turn makes them better partners for IT in general. They can deliver solutions that are customized and responsive and thus more effective in covering the immediate needs of the end users. We aim to increase our decentralized team of developers across all departments. We foresee that in the coming years, this skill set will be as standard as email writing for most data-driven knowledge workers.