2. Table of contents
1 Preface and recommendations
2 Current reality
2 The life sciences market forces
3 Change is accelerating in all areas of the life sciences industry framework
4 A random use case to illustrate IT organizations’ current reality
5 Vision
5 Strategic themes
6 Key IT value chain capabilities
7 Essential traits of future-proof IT value chain capabilities
8 Measure
8 Risk
9 Strategic outcome
9 About the author
Viewpoint
3. Preface and recommendations
We are pleased to present this discussion paper outlining a point view by Hewlett Packard
Enterprise (HPE) on how to disrupt the life sciences industry with digital products and services
that deliver value to the patient beyond the pill.
In this paper, we offer a high-level vision, related strategic themes, and IT value chain
capabilities that are critical for the success of IT organizations of life sciences companies.
In preparing this paper, we have taken into consideration life sciences industry-specific intelligence,
the knowledge gained during current HPE customer engagements within the life sciences
industry, as well as insights and trends that we see in industries related to the life sciences.
“The future of medicine is no longer blood and guts, but
bits and bytes.”
– Richard M. Satava, Professor—University of Washington
We aim to help develop, transform, and manage a best practice for IT operations that deliver on
tomorrow’s patient expectations. In this context, we begin with three key recommendations and
calls-to-action targeted at IT organizations of life sciences companies:
• Recommendation #1: Drive digital business model innovation through rapid innovation
projects that promote digital assets to create new business value and revenue.
• Call-to-action #1: Cater to the notion of two-speed organizations by establishing a Fluid IT
capability that concentrates on agility and speed. Use R&D IT to become the digital leadership
team using Fluid IT means for the organization, the processes, and tools.
• Recommendation #2: Enable demand-driven provisioning of subscription- and consumption-
based digitized services.
• Call-to-action #2: Establish a Hybrid IT capability and abstract sourcing and management
across systems of engagement and systems of records, using a mixture of “run” delivery
models from various service providers including legacy and in-house services.
• Recommendation #3: Provide access to hyper-personalized apps and an ever-growing
portfolio of digital assets for more meaningful patient relationships.
• Call-to-action #3: Transform the existing IT value chain to a contiguous, fully digitized
services management circuit. Focus on existing, burning IT capabilities that are not fit for
purpose anymore for the promotion of digital assets.
To support life sciences companies’ increased focus on the
patient, what strategic themes and value chain capabilities
will drive their IT organizations toward overcoming the
common thread—the convergence of the life sciences
industry and technology—and enable them to deliver value
“beyond the pill” in the era of “digital everything?”
Viewpoint Page 1
4. The remainder of this paper is structured around answering the preliminary question of what
strategic themes and IT value chain capabilities will drive IT organizations forward toward life
sciences companies’ goal of delivering value beyond the pill. Moreover, it provides the rationale
for our conclusions and the basis of our recommendations.
Current reality
”Have a disease, get a pill, kill something.” The current medical treatment model can be
summarized with these eight words by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American
physician and scientist who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his book The Emperor of All
Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. The expectation for the future medical treatment is, however,
that cells may soon replace pills, at least to some extent.
“Have a disease, get a pill, and kill something.”
–Siddhartha Mukherjee, Assistant Professor—Columbia University
Similarly, on the topic of the future of medical treatments, Professor Richard M. Satava, M.D.
holds the opinion that tomorrow’s medicine is all about “bits and bytes.” For example, utilizing
advanced robotics for surgical procedures or making use of virtual reality for tissue engineering.
Both men are forward-thinking authorities in their respective fields, and while the examples
above look at life sciences from different vantage points, one thing is clear: The art of life
sciences is changing rapidly.
The life sciences market forces
The triggers for change in life sciences are manifold. For example, consider ourselves as health
consumers. When we see a doctor, how many of us are looking for confirmation of what we
think we already know, based upon our own research? And don’t we expect instantaneous,
personalized healthcare services tailored to our specific needs, only being willing to pay if the
outcome is positive?
In contrast, and as outlined in Figure 1, healthcare budgets are becoming tighter year over year.
Regulatory agencies are pushing for harmonized and global standards, while the industry is
undergoing an intense technification, putting pressure on well-established life sciences players.
Viewpoint Page 2
One thing is clear: The art of life
sciences is changing rapidly.
Figure 1: The life sciences market forces
Globalized
regulatory
environment
Regulatory agencies harmonizing
procedures, standards, and decisions.
Industry
convergence &
new entrants
Innovative new technologies and
new entrants will gradually reshape
the industry.
Limited
healthcare
budgets
Tighter HC budgets will enforce
outcomes-driven payments.
New technologies will have to prove
better outcomes.
Longer life
expectancy
Global population is becoming older.
Chronic diseases incidence levels
grow 17% YTY.
Empower
health
consumers
Consumers demanding more
information and transparency.
Consumers as director of their
own healthcare.
Decentralized
personalized
healthcare
New technology and governance
models will allow for a more
personalized and decentralized
delivery.
Pervasive
health data
Abundance of health-related data as
hospitals, insurers, government, and
consumers (patients) provide access
to data sources.
Digital
medicine
Internet (of Things), mobile
technology, and digital medicine are
reshaping consumers’ expectations.
5. Change is accelerating in all areas of the
life sciences industry framework
Undoubtedly, the convergence of life sciences with technology, coupled with big trends like
consumerization or “digital everything,” accelerates the rate of change across the core of the life
sciences value chain, as well as in adjacent areas. Figure 2 lists four technification examples of
where change is happening outside and inside of the life sciences core value chain.
1. Consumer-oriented technologies: Engaging with patients (consumers) anytime and
anywhere through various types of IT, or employing wearables to enhance clinical trials, are
just two examples of rapid change in areas related to life sciences.
2. Harnessing and exploiting clinical data: Hospitals around the world are starting to harness
and exploit clinical data for various use cases, be it for medical coding, a real-time patient
dashboard, or making the data available to third parties for monetizing purposes.
3. Real-world evidence for personalized treatments: Life sciences companies are keen to
understand whether their drugs perform as well in the real world as they do in clinical trial
environments. Those real-world evidence (RWE) initiatives rely heavily on, among other
things, real-world clinical data that originates with third parties.
4. Profiling and monitoring consumer behavior: Insurance companies are eager to collect
and analyze data from devices worn by individuals for the purpose of monitoring their
wellness, chronic conditions, or daily habits and exercise routines.
Viewpoint Page 3
Figure 2: Examples of change across the life science industry framework
1 2 43
Patient/
consumer
Payer
Government &
professional
bodies
Service
Sales &
marketing
Supply chain
1
Consumer-
oriented
technologies
2
Harnessing and
exploiting
clinical data
3
Real-world
evidence for
personalized
treatments
4
Profiling and
monitoring
consumer
behavior
Procurement &
manufacturing
Research &
development
Provider
Digital everything
Fluid IT
Adjacent areas Core value chain Adjacent areas
Core IT Fluid IT
6. A random use case to illustrate IT organizations’ current reality
All of the above technification examples exploit pervasive digital connections among systems,
people, places, and things. It’s little wonder that IT organizations are in the spotlight. They need
to turn ideas into real digital products and services. The use case of edible electronic pills is a
very relevant example that illustrates the level of expectation toward IT organizations of life
sciences companies.
This use case1
involves enforcing the “power of a pill” by monitoring and reporting whether
the patient has taken the pill, at what time of day, and whether the dosage complies with the
suggested protocol.
In this use case and as shown in Figure 3, the pill is also a sensor, transmitting data as soon
as it comes into contact with stomach fluid to an arm patch worn by the patient. The sensor
is essentially made out of minerals, such as silicon, magnesium, and copper, and thus is fully
edible. The arm patch sends data to a nearby device, such as the patient’s smartphone. The
related app on the smartphone transmits the data to the patient’s doctor, or to a caretaking
relative who wants to confirm that the patient is on track with taking the medication as
prescribed by the doctor.
To bring such a use case to market, IT organizations must be ready to quickly develop a proof
of concept for a mobile health application. They must run a pilot phase to test scalability,
continuously promote code into production, offer a hyper-personalized mobile health
application in a self-service marketplace, monitor mobile health consumption for billing and
reporting, predict and resolve incidents and threats, capture user acceptance and experience
from social media and the help desk, report on internal KPIs, and more.
1
Source: FDA clearance of ingestible sensor
Viewpoint Page 4
IT organizations are in the spotlight.
They need to turn ideas into real
digital products and services.
Photo: Proteus Digital Health
Figure 3: FDA approved edible electronic pills
7. Vision
Considering current reality, as life sciences companies strive toward their goal of creating value
beyond the pill, the effort will not occur in a vacuum.
In the era of digital everything, every company across the life sciences value chain and
ecosystem morphs into a digital business. In what we call the “idea economy,”2
every digital
business can disrupt existing players in every direction, in every corner of the core value chain
and the adjacent areas. And the rate at which new digital products and services come to market
is accelerating.
Life sciences players must find ways to accelerate the speed of both innovation and
transformation to deliver new outcomes to their customers and patients. And in this context,
success is defined by how quickly life sciences companies and their IT organizations can turn
ideas into value.
In other words, we envision for IT organizations of life sciences companies nothing less than an
aptitude for promoting digital assets at business speed, and a shift to serving as a value creator.
Strategic themes
At HPE, we believe that the advent of digital everything is the opportunity for IT organizations
across the life sciences industry to transform from a typical IT cost-efficiency play to an IT
investment play.
Reflecting on the current situation and in support of the defined vision, a number of strategic
themes arise that help crystallize the types of heavy lifting that IT organizations will need to do.
Strategic theme #1: Drive digital business innovation
• Point of departure: IT organizations make significant investments into industrializing the
companies’ business processes and products, but don’t change the way companies do business.
• Point of aspiration: With the technification of the life sciences industry, IT organizations can
drive the exploitation of pervasive digital connections among systems, people, places and
things, enabling transformative growth.
Strategic theme #2: Enable the agile life science enterprise
• Point of departure: Sourcing and technology decisions are made within the companies’
business units as IT organizations fail to respond to the speed-of-business demands.
• Point of aspiration: IT organizations are relevant to the business and deliver services
instantly by preintegrating and consuming digitized assets as-a-Service offerings.
Strategic theme #3: Show business value of the investment in IT
• Point of departure: The common IT investment denominator and business case is cost
savings, despite the fact that conventional IT capabilities are already industrialized with little
cost-saving rewards.
• Point of aspiration: Accelerating velocity is the key to fast ROI. IT organizations can drive
rapid digital innovation projects that promote digital assets to create new business value
and revenue.
2
HPE, “HPE Matter; The Next Enterprise”, 2015
Viewpoint Page 5
In the era of “digital everything,” every
company across the life sciences value
chain and ecosystems morphs into a
digital business.
We at HPE envision for IT organizations of
life sciences companies nothing less than
an aptitude for promoting digital assets at
business speed, and a shift to serving as a
value creator.
8. Strategic theme #4: Unlock cost savings
• Point of departure: Front-end heavy “plan” and “build” IT solution lifecycles and committed
OPEX “run” cost leave IT organizations with limited headroom for innovation and change.
• Point of aspiration: Leaner IT solutions lifecycle with increased productivity and operational
efficiency by industrializing code promotion into production, and using a mixture of “run”
delivery models (Hybrid IT).
Strategic theme #5: Secure the digital enterprise
• Point of departure: Increased security exposure as companies have outgrown their protection
capabilities, especially for digital assets that are offered beyond the companies’ borders.
• Point of aspiration: IT organizations take pro-active measures and dynamically provision
security controls, based on security exposure that is measured continuously and in real time
across the entire ecosystem.
Key IT value chain capabilities
Moving toward the vision where IT organizations of life sciences companies create strategic
agility and value, and where IT organizations deliver against the five strategic themes, requires
attention to a number of key IT capabilities.
These key IT capabilities are ultimately targeted at promoting digital assets (see recommendation #1),
and providing access to hyper-personalized apps (see recommendation #2) for deeper and
more meaningful relationships with patients.
Viewpoint Page 6
Figure 4: Key IT capabilities along the IT4IT value chain
Plan
Life sciences companies
ecosystem
Marketplace to hyper
personalize apps
Rapid
vulnerability
identification
and resolution
Application
lifecycle
management
repository
Continuous
code
testing
Rapid
software
delivery
Programmable
IT/bimodal IT
Smart
machine-
enabled
services
Continuous
business
and IT
alignment
Service and
application
portfolio
management
Project and
portfolio
arrangement
Executive
flight
control
Single
system
of record
Social
ITSM
Predictive
incident
identification
and
elimination
Real-time
thread
detection
Asset
lifecycle
management
Infrastructure
Automation
engines
Hybrid
IT
Intelligent
orchestration
engines
Consume/
buildSour
ce/deploy/offerRun
9. We like to organize these IT capabilities along the IT4IT3
value chain, which is a blueprint for a
contiguous, fully digitized service lifecycle management circuit that we developed together with
companies, such as Shell, AT&T, and Munich Re. The blueprint ensures continuous alignment
between the business and IT, as shown in Figure 4, from planning to consumption and from
deployment to run.
The IT capabilities shown in Figure 4 summarize people, process, and technology and related
governance. Some of these capabilities are conventional IT value chain capabilities, but are no
longer fit for purpose for the new style of business. Therefore, they need to be transformed into
something new.
Besides conventional capabilities, a number of new IT value capabilities need to be introduced
and established, such as “rapid software delivery.”
Rather than a revolutionary approach in which IT organizations attempt to tackle all of the IT
capabilities at once, this transformation is intended as a journey. IT organizations can start their
transformation at any point on the diagram.
Essential traits of future-proof IT value chain capabilities
Below are some examples of how conventional and new IT capabilities need to be transformed,
and/or established to create a successful model for tomorrow’s IT organizations.
• Digital marketplace: One-stop-shop for the entire ecosystem, providing access to hyper-
personalized apps and all manner of digital assets (systems of engagement) for deeper and
more meaningful relationships with customers, partners, and increased employee engagement
and productivity.
• Smart-machine-enabled services:4
These are a new kind of industrialized and commercially
available service that will shift from labor-intensive to digitized operations, resulting in
significant cost savings and increased quality and speed.
• DevOps capability: Paradigm shift from “design-to-last” to “design-for-change,” and the
ability to accelerate business innovation across systems of engagement and systems of
records by managing the entire IT stack as code.
• Rapid software delivery capability: Ensures fast-paced incremental releases of software to
manage large-scale digital business projects.
• Continuous code testing capability: In support of a continuous delivery value chain,
continuous code testing is targeted at the automated execution of predefined suites of test
cases, providing rapid feedback of test results to developers and other stakeholders.
• Rapid vulnerability identification and resolution capability: As applications are a prime
target for cyber-attacks, this capability is in support of building security from the inside out,
scanning and containing threats before they become a problem, prioritizing issues based on
the companies’ preferences and policies.
• Hybrid IT capability: Ability to abstract sourcing and management across systems of
engagement and systems of records, using a mixture of “run” delivery models from various
service providers, including legacy and in-house services.
3
Source: IT4IT overview
4
Gartner term that includes technologies
such as process automation, virtual agents,
autonomics, cognitive computing, artificial
intelligence and machine learning
Viewpoint Page 7
10. • Intelligent orchestration engines: Ability to orchestrate process automation across multiple
functional requirements, using built-in intelligence to change workflows dependent on policies
and business outcomes.
• Automation engines: Ability to automate tasks throughout the entire IT stack and across
smart-machines and IoT.
• Asset lifecycle management capability: Ability to control and manage IT assets in a
user-centric subscription model where cost is directly linked to content consumption and
application utilization, facilitating asset transparency across the entire IT environment, and
providing a data stream for smart-machines.
Measure
Considering the vision, the strategic themes, and the suggested underpinning IT value chain
capabilities, we foresee a multidimensional business impact in the core life sciences value chain
and adjacent areas.
We have seen business model innovation across all areas of the life sciences industry
framework. For example, we successfully implemented a real-time patient dashboard at the
Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford,5
targeting the prevention of human medical errors,
improving compliance, and predicting what patients will need intensive care.
Similarly, we partnered with a research institution to drive an initiative targeted at harnessing
and exploiting clinical data to third parties, benefitting initiatives like real-world evidence (RWE).
This initiative represented a potential new revenue stream for the research institution.
We also pushed the practice of medical coding to the next level by assisting a health care and
cutting-edge medical institution in improving the accuracy of its billing and invoicing.
In addition, we are helping more than 100 hospitals across Spain deliver an improved patient
experience by implementing an HPE industry solution using, among other elements, electronic
medical records.
Risk
From our perspective, transforming IT organizations of life sciences companies into value
creators that can promote digital assets at business speed carries the following risks:
• IT organizations are unable to take control of technology and sourcing decisions within their
ecosystem, leading to increased risk exposure, integration challenges, and increased cost.
• Companies resist putting IT organizations in the driver’s seat for the development and
promotion of digital assets, keeping their main focus on cost reduction and increased
operational efficiency.
• IT organizations lose credibility with business stakeholders because of lack of speed and the
traditional IT approach to developing IT products and services.
• Companies have inadequate means for securing the digital enterprise and an insufficient
understanding of how to avoid or mitigate risk, leading to an increased overall risk exposure.
5
Reference: HPE Lucile Packard
Children’s Hospital Stanford
Viewpoint Page 8
11. Strategic outcome
Building a foundation for successful execution of strategic priorities is never uncomplicated.
However, we at HPE view the vision, strategic themes, and the underpinning IT value chain
capabilities as essential for helping life sciences companies move beyond the pill. Furthermore,
we believe the three recommendations offered in this paper can help IT organizations kick-start
their transformation journey.
In summary, we foresee the following strategic outcomes for IT organizations of life
sciences companies:
• The ability to drive digital business model innovation by developing and promoting digital
assets as a strategic imperative and a radical departure from today’s status quo
• The ability to increase time to value, and therefore create a competitive edge within
the marketplace
• The ability to improve the patient’s experience and engage patients within context
Learn more at
hpe.com/us/en/services/consulting/industry-specific.html
About the author
Andreas Jenzer is a distinguished technologist for HPE and an 18-year IT veteran with
experience in life sciences and other verticals. In his role, he looks after a number of outsourcing
clients where he offers thought leadership and strategic direction around next-generation IT
capabilities and architectures. An open group master certified architect, Andreas is the author
and co-author of articles such as “Maximizing the Value of Cloud for Small-Medium-Enterprises”
and books dealing with topics such as implementing SAP.
Viewpoint Page 9