Five Lessons From My Life Sciences Detour

Learning about technology planning by building real life solutions

Here are five things I’ve learned in my detour through life sciences bookended by technology roles:

1. Regulated companies can and should innovate aggressively. I heard “we can’t do that, we’re in a regulated industry” but the reality is that regulation involves traceability, accountability, validation and documentation. If you use innovative technology to improve those capabilities, and move the decision point about quality earlier in the design, development and testing cycle (think agile, build-test-deploy versus build-deploy-test) then you can actually improve both your regulatory stance and your technology adoption rates. When you move further to decision hygiene and after action reviews, you identify the roadblocks or information gaps that dampen this acceleration.

2. The CIO defines technology as the ingredient brand. In a technology company, your product equals technology and you measure consumption of that top level brand. When you’re scaling science, patient outcomes, or manufacturing, you have to measure the net effect in terms of user experience, throughput, efficiency, or time. You’re literally putting a metric on your technology user happiness.

3. Every technology phase creates ripples in the status quo. Most of these waves are seen as tsunami level threat until they start to overlap and you get positive wavelet reinforcement. On the technology leading edge, consider historical shifts in client/server computing, cloud computing, use of REST services, machine learning, quantum computing and now generative AI – each was met with some derision of being too {slow, insecure, non-scalable, imprecise, difficult to develop}. All require solid architectural skills and ownership of the resulting design patterns, and all have (or will) produce step function changes in our ability to probe and scale a number of domains. Analogs from other industries abound: The music industry has been reformatted ten times in the last hundred years from player piano rolls to streaming services, and each time the supposed death knell for music actually expanded the market. I believe we are still in the Mapquest-on-AOL dialup (with printed directions) phase of using technology to scale the biology and chemistry spaces. We will look back in a decade and wonder how we prosecuted science without these tools, the same way I look back with honor and wonder at my grandfather who treated patients in the Pennsylvania coal mining region in the early 20th century with a pocket watch, microscope and stethoscope.

4. Always think two career arcs ahead. When I left Oracle in 2010, I jokingly told a good friend that I was interested in being the CTO of a sports league, a media company, or a pharmaceutical company. The next job I accepted at Juniper accidentally prepared me for those roles, when that same friend called to say that Merck had a job equivalent to my goal. Three jobs later, I was able to tie the threads together at J&J. Always know what skills you will need and how your current and next jobs will get you there. J&J CIO Jim Swanson says, “Write your next job description.” Doing that captures those skills, experiences and goals in a paragraph.

5. Have fun. We work in very serious business, and issues of privacy, patient respect, patient safety, and medical outcomes are always paramount. You can still have fun with how you approach the work and engage your co-workers. When you do, you enjoy your co-workers, you make nerd and math jokes, laugh at Lord of the Rings naming schemes or just look forward to celebrating Pi Day (US or European dates), you break down barriers to make everyone a bit more included.

My next set of adventures will be once again much more technology focused, driving scale and adoption across industries and emergent technology capabilities. I’ll be equally thinking about the arc after that, a mix of semi-retirement, music, education, sustainability of people and places, and as always, way more science fiction than is considered medically necessary.

As part of my nascent technology strategy shop, I’ll be moving Creating Space to a primarily paid subscriber model. For the cost of one medium iced coffee a month, you can read my fully edited yet unexpurgated and sometimes unruly comments about technology, socialization of tech, music, life on the road, sports and their fans, and NJ’s favorite breakfast meats.

References:

Jason Victor and Peter Lega’s 2016 USENIX LISA talk on marrying waterfall and agile in life sciences.

Annie Duke, “How To Decide,” one of my required reading books about decision making, information gathering, and after action thinking.

Bill Rosenblatt and Howie Singer’s “Key Changes” about the ten technology disruptions that have forced change in the music industry, impacting copyright, publishing, listeners and economics.