娇色导航

Hi, good afternoon and welcome to 娇色导航Leadership Live. I'm your host, Maryfran Johnson, the CEO of Maryfran Johnson Media and the former Editor In Chief of 娇色导航Magazine and events.

Since November of 2017 this video and audio podcast has been produced by the editors and the video producers at CIO.com

our growing online library of past interviews available on both CIO.com and CIOs YouTube channel includes more than 150

Chief Information, Chief Digital and Chief Technology Officers from mid size to large companies across the nation.

Sponsoring today's episode is Vasion print, formerly known as printer logic, which lets you simplify your IT infrastructure by replacing those resource intensive print servers with direct IP serverless printing with built in AI and automation.

Vasion print is a cloud native solution that helps eliminate one of the biggest drains on your IT resources. See how at Vasion.com

joining me for today's show is Bob McCowan, the global 娇色导航of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, with over 30 years of global executive experience, Bob is responsible for Regeneron IT strategy, which means he is he and his team are supporting the research, commercial, cyber security and enterprise operations that run the company around The world.

Founded in 1988 Regeneron is a $14.2 billion US based biotech company employing 15,000 people across 30 countries. Its major focus is on discovering developing and commercializing medicines that treat very serious diseases.

The company is also known for a strong focus on genetic medicines and leverages lots a lot of data powered insights from its own Regeneron genetics center.

Bob joined the company just about 10 years ago and 2014 as an IT director, moving up through the ranks to 娇色导航role by 2018

and along the way, steadily accelerating his team's focus on big data innovation and digital transformation strategies, the accomplishments of Regeneron, IT team have been recognized across the industry with multiple biotech and technology industry honors, including Our own 娇色导航100 Innovation Award, which his team has brought home four out of the last five years prior to joining the company, Bob held it leadership roles at other international organizations including Amgen Artemis International Computer Sciences Corp and Lockheed.

Bob, it's great to have you here. Welcome. It's great to be here. Maryfran thank you for inviting me. Pleasure.

Let's start out with Let's start out with a look inside this multiple award winning team, this tech team that you have built and augmented and grown over the last six plus years as CIO, how?

How did you envision and then structure the IT organization to deliver so much value to this biotech leader?

It's a great question. I think when I joined, we

had a lot of legacy challenges, and so one of the first things we needed to do was figure out, how do we really leapfrog

and address the legacy gaps? And the way we did that was to really take a cloud first strategy. And so we had a strong team to begin with, but by hiring some key individuals into the organization.

We focused around building out essentially, a whole new set of infrastructure and services around this idea of everything in the cloud. Yes, and

by doing that, it allowed us to accelerate and almost leapfrog, in some cases, because some of the technologies we had had been put in place when the company was an R and D organization, we had no product, and so it allowed us to go really fast.

But what that created was an environment where people were hungry to explore new ideas, new ways of working.

It allowed us to demonstrate the value of things like the cloud, which know, when you start talking big data, you have to think about computation, you have to think about storage, you have to think about growth.

And so it really was a ideal environment for bringing groups together to solve business problems with tech. Technologies.

And I think that partnership and being a research organization, experimentation is a very acceptable approach. It allowed us to really demonstrate, provide proof of concept, show what was possible, and get everyone involved.

And it wasn't just it, it was our scientific partners, our business partners were very this as well, well. And I was thinking about that large percentage of your employee base that are the PhD status biostatisticians and doctors and scientists of all stripes.

And I know from interviewing other CIOs over the year years that there is quite an interesting challenge in putting yourself forward as a great IT organization, when the scientific community may just see you as you know, essentially a functional operation that is supplying them the computers they need on their desktops.

But it sounds, from what I've read about your accomplishments there at Regeneron, you've changed that relationship between, you know, the the top producers and the doctors at the organization, and the kind of respect that it now generates, yes and no.

Okay, I think, I think we have so the IT organization, I mentioned it was legacy based, and there's a lot of things we didn't do well, and so we had to earn the right so as an example, we had to start with basics of now, we needed to make sure email operates.

We needed to make sure people could get to their data, and we needed to make sure that the Oracle systems would operate. So a lot of it was building the basic ability to run the operations without problems, right?

Which then was the stepping stone to say, Well, if you can do the basics, then what else can you help us with? And over time, it was through partnerships, of saying, well,

now the big computation work you're doing, you're doing it with. I'm exaggerating, but a server stuck under your table.

What if we were to build you a high performance computer in the cloud as you started building out those type of solutions, then there's a lot more openness to Okay, what else can you do? What else can you help us with?

And I think we're in a good place today. We certainly have very strong capability, and the partnership is very different from where it was five years ago.

Yeah, but you have to, I think a lot of organizations, at times, get caught up with the latest greatest technology and race off to see what's possible. And I'm a strong believer, and my team are strong believers that you got to keep the basics in place.

You've always got to be thinking about that underlying capability that is used day to day. It might be boring, it might be basic, but without it, you can't run the organization, and you can't make your eye off that.

And then on top of that, you get to do the potentially more interesting, more impactful work as well. Okay, well,

I was a little surprised when we talked earlier and you told me you have somewhere around 420

dedicated full time equivalents on your IT organization, but then two or three times more than that, with other outside contractors that you're working with,

I that almost felt like a relief to me, because for a $14 billion organization in 30 countries. I look at, you know, a staff of 400 plus, and it feels like that would be a very heavy workload on everybody.

I think the model we put in place was to find really strong partners, yes, and so from a managed service perspective, now the day to day support for what we do, we have a very strong partner, and it was critical to us, because our globalized even though we've been a global company, from a commercialization perspective, some of that has only happened fairly recently.

So we've rolled out into

1518, different countries in a two year period. And that was only possible, but by these partnerships, yeah. And the way we're organized is we have a large group that takes care of that day to day, operational work, sure.

And then we have embedded it, for example, a group of, want to say 70 or 80 that are dedicated to the research organization. There's another group of 4050 dedicated to the clinical operation.

So they're working day by day with those particular groups to try to support them and also try and drive how they can do things better

when we started, or when I started in this role. 10 years ago, there was only 3000 office so we've been growing rapidly. So a large portion of this has been building out the underlying capability to expand.

End, and you get into these different countries, you've got a lot of rules and regulations.

We're a little spoiled here in America because we're so big, and therefore you can build out the big infrastructure to support a very big country, but when you go into some of these smaller countries, it takes almost just as much effort, but you might be supporting teams of 15 or 20 or 100 people, so you have to learn how to scale it as well.

Yeah. Well, the in one

of the previous interviews with you that I read, you referred to yourself as being a reluctant CIO. When was that?

Because I know you were the executive IT director in charge of all the enterprise operations and that sort of thing before the CIO, and that you were an Interim 娇色导航for a little while, what made you hesitate and think that you weren't going to just love being the CIO.

I think a lot of it was you get caught up in this.

I guess the myth of the CIO, which is driving transformation and always doing something fantastically new that causes these organizations to accelerate and growth? Yeah?

And I think the reality is that can happen, but in more cases, it's really just about partnering, understanding the context of where you are today and what's needed for today and driving it forward.

And so I think that when they first reached out, the reason I was reluctant was

I hadn't really given much thought

to the vision of what was necessary, okay? Because No, like a lot of us in the role we're in, we're very focused, focused at being totally successful there. And so you have to step back and be realistic about your individual

capabilities along with that of your team. And so I had to give a lot of thought to

not just, can I do this, but do I want to do it? I think it was more about do I want to do it? Yes.

And once you get to that position, you recognize that anyone that steps into this role is going to be dealing with the same type of challenges. And I think Regeneron is pretty unique. It's founder led, it's it's been going for 35 years.

Founders are co chairs of the board,

and there's a culture here, which I think is pretty unique. It's it's driven by the science. Everything we do is, is about finding

ways to help our patients. And so when I started thinking about the whole mission behind the organization,

I got to, I guess I got comfortable with, yes, I can make a difference. Yes, I understand what's needed, and I've also got a good team, so we can make a difference again.

Yeah, well, I'm always very impressed and glad when I find CIOs that have actually been many years with the same company. You've been there now a total of 10 and it doesn't look like you're going to be leaving anytime, you know, any moment soon.

So that used to be some years ago. That was not the case with a lot of CIOs.

It was a lot of that, you know, hired him by the board, and it was usually there were CIOs who loved running into a burning building and fixing everything and then moving on.

And then there were, like the longevity CIOs and 娇色导航magazine, we were doing a story about that many years ago, probably 10 or 12 years ago, and we had a little bit of a hard time finding CIOs that had stayed with their companies.

But what I think I'm seeing now is that as CIOs have become more deeply embedded in the business strategy, it's a pretty natural role for them to have significant business responsibilities and understanding as well as technologies.

Am I just am I just making that up, or does that make sense to you? No, I would agree. And I think I mean,

Regeneron is a biopharma company, yes. And I think what we do is long term. It takes time to go through the research, the discovery, the clinical building out the manufacturing and commercialization.

And so if anyone steps into this thinking that it's a short term game, they're going to be sorely disappointed. Yes, and

I mean, some of the projects that we've celebrated even celebrated through through these awards. Often the genesis of it was years ago, and it was in the preparation of now. We've got strong people. We have demonstrated success. How do you create

an approach that you can codify that and use technology to do it even better? In some cases, these projects or programs?

Can take two, three years to put in place, right? Yeah, and in many cases,

they're continually evolving and rolling into different parts of the organization. So I think depending on the industry,

some organizations are probably not served well by churning CIOs too frequently, yes. And I think biopharma is one of those. You have to take a long term view

to really get the benefits. Yes, well, and I was thinking that in my intro when I called Regeneron, a biotech company, that's that's a mistake on my part. It's actually biopharmaceuticals is very different from being a biotech provider. I think

we consider ourselves a biotechnology and often, often within the organization, we'll have discussions about technology, and when you dig into it, it's good zero to do with information technology.

So we have, sort of, I guess, a wealth of capabilities in the technology space, but you have to sort of scratch beneath the surface to really understand what are we talking about. And now these days, the two go hand in hand.

I mean information technology and some of these new capabilities have really come to the forefront in the last 1824,

months are opening up new ideas, new ways of working. But then again, underneath it, you've still got thinking large language models, for example, you still have the human in the center. You still have the human touch for what we're doing. But

the way you go about trying to drive the results can be very different from just how it was two or three years ago.

Well, a few months ago, I think it was right at your 10th Anniversary point, you posted a very lovely note on LinkedIn where you were basically thanking your team for, you know, being part of the amazing evolution and the hard work they've all done.

And there was one of the points in there, it's very nice reading, and I would recommend that people go and check out your profile to take a look at it.

It's an unusual thing for CIOs to do, to kind of organize their thoughts that way and say And here's 10 wonderful things that I've been grateful for, but I especially what one, the one that caught my eye was number nine, which was about elevating the use of data.

For example, we focused on capturing and connecting research data at individual experiment levels, and this, of course, included the Regeneron data platform, data literacy, training and implementing the data catalog.

Now I know that all those four out of the last five years that you have come home with a 娇色导航100 Innovation Award, it has all been for various data plans and programs and stuff. Talk about one of them.

Talk about the most recent one that the that you won the award for.

So the most recent one was using large language models. And if you ask some of our scientists,

what's the biggest challenge, yeah, often it's them trying to find the right information necessary to anything from researching an area of interest that they want to get up to speed on, or find data of some of the experimentation or results they got from prior work, from 510, 15 years past.

And we use these models to try and figure out, how do you go and identify that codify, codify it in such a way they can use you can search for it, and it's a face value.

It sounds straightforward, because you hear about these large language models being designed for that. But the end of the day, you have to train them.

And not only that, the data has to be, in some cases, structured in a way that they can be searched to make sure that you get the right results.

And so we put a lot of effort into working with our colleagues to understand what it was they were trying to achieve, what was the internal information they wanted to get? What were the external sources they wanted to get? How did they

identify where it came from so that they could actually reference it and understand

and get credit, where credit was due for where that information came from? Yes. And so that was one of the programs we put in for this year. It's

early stages, but solving it for this group is really a stepping stone to solving it for many other groups across the organization, and it's often how we we drive the six.

SaaS here, we'll find one group solve the problem for for them, but our architect in such a way that we can start scaling it up and growing it and driving it across the rest of the organization. Yeah.

Now you are also very familiar with work at the board level. I know that you're a certified by the National Association of Corporate Directors.

And one of the things that I saw you said about that was, well, you've grown in the role, and you do speak with a lot of CEOs that you get them together on round tables, and tell me, tell tell us about that.

What is, are you invited into the round tables as one of the members of the executives at Regeneron, or are these roundtables that you yourself are running these I'm invited in, but these are, if you reach out, the opportunities exist. There's organizations to do this. Yeah, and

here in New York, there's quite a few. And I'm part of some other groups that set these up, and I think, and I'm

avoiding using their names, just that's fine. We don't have to. Nobody needs the plug.

But I think the benefit is that you get to see how people, different people think you get to see what made them successful, and often the engagement model is such that they will share very openly, provided you don't

share the details out. You can take it, personalize it, learn from it. And often they will tell you about their failures as much as they tell you about their successes, because you can learn so much about failures.

And so these are ways for me to stay connected, to try and figure out what other groups are doing

and whether or not it would make sense for us, right? I think the certification that you talked about was interesting in that

I it gives you an insight into what some of the board members are having to think about, because often we're looking at it, they're driving the strategy of the organization, right?

There's also a huge risk aspect to it as well, and so you get an appreciation for that, which then helps you shape what information you need to share, not just with the board, but potentially with your leadership, so that they can then elevate it up as well, right?

So I think putting yourself in other people's shoes and what it is they have to do does give you an appreciation of what level of data you need to provide or what level of information you you need to provide. Got it got it interesting.

And I mean, building on that,

some of these organizations are similar CIOs, where they're basically

$10 billion plus organizations, so same size and same scale and typically the same type of problems. Yes, and what's fascinating about those is, when we get in a room and start talking about the challenges,

either we're all having the same challenge, or we'll find some individuals that are a little bit further ahead in their thinking or a little bit further behind. But it's a great way to actually calibrate, because often, as a CIO, you feel, you can feel a little bit isolated.

Yes, I was just thinking that, yeah. And so this is a way to get in front of it and recognize, well, actually, I'm not so bad. I'm doing some pretty good things here compared to my peers.

And in other cases, it's yeah, I maybe need to pick the pace up. I maybe you need to go back to the team and say, Hey, we need to be looking a little bit more in this place, or maybe we need to accelerate here.

So I'm a big advocate for staying close to what's happening within your own industry and your own peers, but also reaching out and going a little broader and middle, maybe a little bit further up in terms of the org structure to get into the minds of how people are operating well, and we, we've always noticed that at our various 娇色导航events over the years, you probably, I'm sure you saw that at the 娇色导航100 event, you get CIOs in a room, and the minute you give everybody five minutes to talk amongst themselves at the tables, the whole room explodes with sound, because everybody has got so much in common, and I've always been just personally, I've been very impressed with the generosity and the willingness to share and talk openly about problems.

It's I don't think you find that kind of information exchange, for instance, in a room full of marketing people, you know? I mean, it's just the competition between different levels, different sea levels is different than it is for CIOs.

As you said, I think you're all working on or solving a lot of the same kind of issues.

I think it's changed as.

Well, I mean, when you go back to sort of my reluctancy to take this role,

the role of a 娇色导航in the past is much more technical in nature. And people would get in and talk about the simplified,

the bits and the bytes of how it all fitted together. Yeah, these days it's all about business.

It's about understanding the business now you drive the business forward, and absolutely you need to understand the technology and what's the opportunities are as well as the risks that are coming down the pipe. I find more and more we're talking not about

now which piece of technology is going to help us, but we're talking about what's the problem we're trying to solve? Yeah, and I find that the dialog and the engagement has absolutely changed, and now, because of that, you're seeing a different,

I guess, a more diverse group of CIOs that in many cases,

They have come up through the business. They're not necessarily coming up through the technical ranks, yes. So it's a different group, and I think that enriches the discussions, but it also gives you a different perspective of how to support your particular organization.

Yeah, well, and I think that's a great observation, because I think that the 娇色导航ranks themselves are much more diversified by backgrounds and talents and technical versus business skills than they used to be.

And when you think about the way the title has evolved over the years, we used to, we used to write about this endlessly in 娇色导航magazine. You know, because for 1020, years, CIOs were busy trying to prove their worth as business executives.

They didn't want to be seen as the tech guys or the tech gals. And now I don't know that it's come full cycle, but there is much more appreciation, I think, on the business side, for the importance of technology.

And so many CIOs have MBAs and are already business thinkers to begin with. You had mentioned that a lot of your staff these days has PhDs in sciences, which you might not have found at the company 20 or 30 years ago. No, absolutely.

I think it's necessary, because if you're trying to solve a problem for an individual but you can't really understand what it is they're trying to solve for or even how they think about it. It becomes very difficult.

So having some of those key individuals, we often call them translators here, meaning that we know the hardcore science and our core technical architecture and building the engineering and provide that translation to make sure that we get the results right.

Yeah, but I think more and more we're beginning to see that,

I will say things have changed. So if I go back to y 2k era,

everything was app driven. Everything was about apps. Yeah. Now where we are, it's back to software development. It's you actually need your IT folks to understand how to write code.

And of course, you got no llms that can help you write code, but you still need to understand how to write code.

But I think that's one of those gaps that people didn't necessarily understand with that journey to the cloud, you're now having to think like a software developer. You're having to think how to articulate and put those different components together into an overall product. And

that was a challenge, because it certain times I felt we, within our organization, we had a lot of great people, but they were supporting

standard apps, and they had, they had, maybe not, fully appreciated the need to also understand how to build architect and code. It's finding the right balance. But everything's full circle. We're back to you need software developers.

You need people that really understand. I've heard more about searches for data engineers and software developers over the last two to three, even five years than ever before.

You know, no one really talked about the well, and you you've been around long enough to have seen all the different waves and trends where everything gets outsourced and we don't. We're not. We don't need to be creating the technology here now. It's like, well, we need to.

We need software development. We need data engineers. What are your currently? What are your biggest hiring challenges when you go out? Do you have, like, a lineup of candidates who would love to come and work for you and so it's a snap, or are you?

Are you struggling to find talent in certain areas? Okay?

I think

if I go back to the model we have, we have a core group of FTEs, and then we have partners,

strategic partners, and so often, if we are early stage experimentation, we'll have a small number of our in house resources work with those partners and do it in a way that we can do knowledge transfer and grow I think now if you're going to hold on to your staff, you literally have to be open to retraining and re educating them on a continuous basis.

Yeah, absolutely.

You've got to go outside and you've got to bring in some new skill sets. You've got to do both. But I think for the continuity, you also have to have a group within your organization that is continually learning, continually going to push themselves.

I mean, I think people do want to work for Regeneron. It's a fantastic company. We have a great reputation for being a great place to work. So when we hire, we get plenty of candidates. I think we often talk about Regeneron being

a tough place to join. We put people through a rigorous process to bring them on board.

That's because we want to try and bring the most talented people, but we also want to make sure that the culture fits correct for them, and it's a fit for them, and they're going to be successful here.

The Data Analytics is a interesting space. It's actually very difficult to find people, because

everyone identifies them, these days, themselves, these days, as experts in insights and analytics. For example, yeah, example. And you have to dig deeper into what does that really mean? Are they great at writing reports, or how do they think about the data is being used?

How do they think about data is coming in, how it's being created, how it's leaving the organization? What's the best way to ingest it, digest it, share it.

The interview process is super critical these days. Yeah, really pressure test that you're getting what you think you're getting now.

Tell me, I'm always fascinated when CIOs mention their company cultures and how appealing they may or may not be to various types of technology talent, how do you, how do you pitch the Regeneron culture?

What is, how do you describe it, and what is it about it that makes it unique from, say, other pharma companies, like some of the really the big guys, you know, like Eli Lilly, or the big pharma companies. I

think a lot of it comes down to our founders and George and

they started the company with a mission, and they haven't deviated. It's about finding

sort of breakthrough medicines to help patients, sort of over and over again. And if you look, we have numerous FDA approved drugs. I think there's 14 of them now that were all generated and created by your workforce.

They were not someone else's work that you took and fashioned into a pharmaceutical. Absolutely. I mean, we have a juggernaut of a research engine. I mean, you look at our pipeline, you look where we are, it's very strong,

and I think that sets the tone for the rest of the organization. It's about innovation. It's about experimentation. It's about trying to push boundaries. And you see that with the researchers. And it really

empowers the rest of us to go and say, Okay, how can we benefit from this great research? How do we help move forward?

Some of the techniques that we use are now.

We'll bring some of our patient advocates in, and they'll just talk about the difference that our products made in their lives or their family's lives. And now, when you're in it and the technology company, it's all about technology.

When you're in it, and a company like ours, yeah, you can't get lost because it's all about the drugs we're producing.

So when you have that mechanism to really tie back what you're doing and the impact what you of what you're doing has on helping those drugs get to those patients. It really does keep you focused on mission.

And so having these mechanisms, or being able to listen and hear the patients talk about the life changes that they've

drugs have brought for them. It really is a powerful message. And I think no, that's I

was gonna say, it's reinforced, but it's actually part of the DNA. It's how we operate, okay, and so in many cases, the way decisions are made. This.

My feeling, not necessarily saying this is exactly how it's done, but it feels like we're always looking at doing what's right and doing what's best for the patient, and sometimes that might be a little bit

misaligned if you're trying to drive now the dollar and cent out of every decision. I think I keep in that higher vision of, is this the right thing to do for these drugs to get to the patients?

It gets you to think and operate in a slightly different way. And now clearly, you look at the growth of this organization, the success, it definitely works well.

And we've been talking a lot about the IT organization and some of these philosophies, I want to go up on a pivot to kind of the bigger picture look across your business and what kind of issues your customers have had to deal with, or maybe the business itself in the Very high stakes, disruptive environment that there is right now, especially for companies in the pharmaceutical industries, describe that a little bit and just kind of talk about, what are the things that are on your mind and also on the mind of your other C suite members?

What are the things that that you're trying to resolve and how you're addressing these challenges to your own business. So I can't really talk to the

business side, per se, I would lead to leave that to others. But I think from a

technology perspective, there's so much going on right now, and so, as an example,

the disruption in India and Pakistan, many of us in technology who are partnering with our colleagues who are in India and Pakistan, yes, well, you have to worry about what's happening to now, the families and the colleagues over there.

But also from a business perspective, is that going to be destabilizing cause cause risks,

and those type of activities, unfortunately, are bubbling up more and more frequently. I think, from

a pure public perspective, you can see there's more and more competition out there. And so competition brings okay, what's potential impact?

How can we look at efficiencies?

How can we make sure that, from an IT perspective, we're doing the right things to help support our commercial organization, our business organization, and so we partner on different activities there to maybe drive efficiencies, or look at how we can potentially use an upgrade technologies to help support, as example, in commercial next pass

action for our field force. And so we're looking at how we support activities

like that the I know a lot of CIOs that I've spoken with recently, I often say, you know, what are your top three concerns these days? Cybersecurity is kind of a given, because that's always on the list, but so are regulatory issues.

I mean, that has, have they also been mounting for your industry, the way they are for some of the other big tech companies and the manufacturers and that sort of thing.

They change on a regular basis, and I think with us expanding globally last couple of years, we've got greater exposure to that, a greater set of regulatory environments past we work with partners, so we didn't have to

get as involved, directly involved, as we are now.

But I think because we work in a very highly regulated environment, we're used to that. We can say you're used to it, yeah, well, we built that agility in that as things change, we can respond very quickly. And

I mean, it's not just in the sort of medical field, taxation as well, on a global basis, is changing on a regular basis. We have a great organization there that, again, has the agility to look what's happening and make those adjustments. Yeah,

I think a lot of organizations, particularly in the regulatory space, build that into how they operate. They have to

and from an IT perspective, now, when you start looking at regulations like GDPR or right to forget you've got to architect your solutions and have the policies and practices and the tools in place to be able to respond to that.

I think, I think that's part of the cost of doing business. And you going right back to the beginning of the discussion. I see that as one of the foundational building blocks is you should be thinking about those and everything. You do because

they're not going away and they're not staying stable, they're going to be changing. So architecture solutions to make sure you can take care of those.

Well, I've had many CIOs over the years. Tell me that really the major job that it always has, and that CIOs specifically always have, are being agents of change, managing the change, making the change work with existing, you know, setups in their companies and so forth. The

for a long time, I've been asking everyone to talk about their digital business models, because, as you mentioned, that when you have a cloud first strategy, that means you've got a lot of activity, moving things into the cloud, or maybe deciding if it stays on premises, and that sort of thing.

How have is that still a relevant question for a company like yours about the digital business model? It absolutely is.

I think

the term may change, but really what you're talking about is

continual change of how you operate, from

a business process, from a

people and a mindset perspective. And so we've identified a lot of areas that we still need to improve and do better on. We have a lot of digital platforms in place, but we also have a lot of

legacy practices, and they can take years to change. Yeah, and it it No.

One of the things you have to get comfortable with is you're going to be digitally very mature in one area, and you can be looking at another area, which because of constraints, and it could be demand constraints, meaning you can never get access to upgrade that.

You know you've got to do something, but you're in a waiting position. So your existing processes of working there may be inefficient. There may be more manual than you would like to have,

but the timing is just not right, and I think that's where you've got to be

thinking about what does digitalization mean? Because

it's always evolving, and you've got to always be able to look back and go what you did was great two years ago, but now you're doing it again, perhaps in a different area.

You might take a slightly different approach, and so you got to find the right balance, to say, Well, where does the consistency have more value and just carry it through, versus, where do you perhaps look at a different approach and knowing that you've just done something that two, three years from now, you're going to have to come back and modernize as well, right?

I think it's long winded way of saying it's a very continuous journey. And I think digital digitization, or digital transformation is never going to go away. Well, then I used to think is Go ahead. I mean, one point I would make is

doing it for the sake of technology makes no sense. The driver has got to be what's the business process? When I often find the bigger issue is not the technology, but it's Can you

can you define what you're actually doing today from a business process, and are you open minded enough to step back and say,

either, yes, this is perfect, and just digitizing it is enough, or do you step back and say, you know, we need to rethink how we're operating. We need to rethink how this work gets done, in which case the digital journey takes on a slightly different path.

Yes, and that part of it is, is often the harder part than the actual implementation of the technology itself. That

makes sense, makes a lot of sense, actually. And actually, I was just thinking, we've been talking for a while now, and I'm amazed we have we haven't touched on AI, we haven't talked about artificial intelligence.

And you've got all these awards you have racked up for work in the data area, and I know they were involved with things like AI and agentic, agentic AI.

What should I be asking you about that that is important for Regeneron in looking at AI

is that has that been kind of baked into what you're doing in data for the last five years? So it's become almost ho hum?

No, I think that

it's interesting up to two year probably two years ago with chat gpts release,

many organizations have been using a i, whether it be machine learning, but using it very effectively, but necessarily something that we talked about right the generative AI has come out, and there's a lot more discussion around it, but I think. Hmm.

Now my belief there's huge value in it, but again, you got to understand how you use it to get that value. And if you're leading, I often hear people will lead with AI. I think that's potentially a mistake.

I think you should be leading with, what are you trying to achieve? What are the outcomes you're looking for and to

go into it with, and how can AI help?

And so to me, AI is

the secondary discussion, and if you haven't had the primary discussion upfront, the likelihood is you're going to spend a lot of time and effort and not get a result that you're actually going to be happy with. And now we talk about data.

Same thing if you're not realistic to know that if you're trying to create large language model solutions and you don't have good data to begin with, again, your outcomes are not necessarily going to get you to where you want to be, and so you have to

think through the whole

journey, if you like, of what are you trying to achieve? What data have you got to support your supposition?

And then decide whether or not engaging in using AI is going to make sense for you at this point in time or not. And the other point I would make is it's

so diverse where you can use AI, if

you think about solutions, like a co pilot,

you know there's value there from a some simplistic approach of it's helping me with my email, or it's helping me find information in my 360 ecosystem. There's a productivity gain there. But if it's only 30 minutes a day for an individual,

okay, 30 minutes a day. Multiply that by, let's say there's 5000 of you, that adds up to a lot.

So small, incremental improvement, but multiplied out, it can be very impactful. And on the other scale, you've got where you're creating

new analytical models with data that you have generated over the last 1015 years, and they can be hugely insightful in helping accelerate one of your research programs.

So I think the extremes are so large that it's almost like before you start the conversation, set the context about what you're trying to talk about, because otherwise you end up in these hour long discussions that just go all over the place, yeah, and no one leaves the meeting happy because you never got to where you needed to get to.

Yeah. Have you created any sort of kind of task forces or tracking organizations to keep up with the latest and greatest in AI, so that you can all keep talking to your other business executives and the scientists who are most interested in this.

A lot of companies seem to be doing that, but you've probably got your own approach to that. At Regeneron,

yes, some formal and some informal. But even before doing that, I think, like a lot of organizations, we're still trying to

solidify and codify our AI governance model, governance models, that's it. Yes.

I think the challenge there is, again, where people see huge opportunity,

others may see huge risks on the legal side. I sympathize with a lot of our legal colleagues, because AI can be so easy to use and so powerful that there's a risk it could expose data that ultimately could create problems,

or it could expose critical IP data. And so I think that's one of the challenges we're going through, is

really understand the use cases. Don't just focus on the positives, but what could go wrong. So we have a lot of different groups looking at that, and as part of that, we're working with

others in the industry and others that are going through similar type discussions, because I think we're all in the same boat. And the difference I think we're seeing is that some organizations are much more open to risk,

and the nature of their business allows them to be much more open to risk, whereas other organizations not financial space, or organizations like ours, where you have certain trade secrets that are absolutely critical, we may take a slightly different approach, because the risks of getting it wrong are so much higher, yeah,

but it's not a one size fits all we have created.

What we called Ask for Jan, which is our version of

our AI model that we have made available to everyone. We've had about 14,000 people sign up for it. 7000 of them are using it on a fairly regular basis, and we're starting to see more and more adoption, but that's basically using

Well, through our Microsoft engagement, a mechanism that allows us

to tap into the technology without exposing any of our data.

Yes, and so it's a protected environment that people can feel confident that they can go and either use the tool productively, or we're also open to them using it in an experimentation approach to fully understand what it can do for them.

Yes, and I think you have to accept that now there might be some financial implication to the experimentation, but if you never try it, you never get to really understand what's possible. Well,

the appearance of chat, GPT and just the generative AI reminds me of the way the iPhone introduction, back in 2007 or so changed, not overnight, but very gradually, the way we thought about mobile devices in our hands, and that was in the popular imagination, picked up on that pretty quickly.

And it seems like boards and CEOs are picking up pretty quickly on all the possible, you know, the the idea that they themselves can get their hands on a technology that can show them interesting things without being technologists themselves.

And I'm I'm never sure if I really applaud that as a trend, or if I worry about all the risky I start sounding like a CSO. You know, where I start worrying about the privacy risks and things that could blow up, but they're very real, though. And I

mean, I've seen scenarios where people are getting upset with different parts of the organization because they feel they're going too fast or slowing things down.

But yeah, I think you have to be respectful, because there's a lot of, if I go back to my legal colleagues, there's a lot of future litigation that hasn't happened yet that's going to set the boundaries for what is and isn't acceptable, right?

No, you just have to look at what's going on and recognize that

claims and counter claims are going to be made at some point in the future based on the use of these technologies. Yeah, there's really no exactly what that's going to look like yet.

So you you have to factor in that there is a downside risk and, oh, yeah, get comfortable with where you're going to go. And as long as you do it

with a clear mindset of what the risks are, what the opportunities are, then I think you're in a good place, but you shouldn't go into it blindly, right?

Well, there's, there may be some comfort there in the notion that CIOs aren't the only ones with things like this to worry about.

Folks on the legal side of the house, on, you know, privacy advocates, all that sort of thing they've got, especially the security and cybersecurity people, have a lot more of this that has to be watched.

So it just maybe, in general, we just all have to, like, be on higher alert with these technologies.

Speaking of this, are there other tech trends, things that are emerging that you're watching? I mean, even beyond all the wonders of AI and whatever it's going to do for us, or to us, things that you and especially the biotech and biopharma industry are watching carefully right now.

I think there's a little bit of attention on quantum computing. I mean, there's a lot of promises for it, and I think

it seems to be accelerating. But again, different groups are seeing it for different reasons. On the cyber side, my CISO

is aware that ultimately, when that's available, is going to be, as example, nation states that tap into it first, and maybe nation states that are not necessarily friendly to our organization,

in which case you have to be thinking about, if you're still using passwords, for example, how at risk are you? And if you have a program to go passwordless, do you need to think about accelerating it so that that one aspect on the other aspect,

could it help accelerate some of the research and some of the analytics? And is the speed increase going to be enough value to tap into that technology now?

Right now, it's going to be very fine tuned. The error rates are very high, but the i.

The quality often is improving on an accelerated basis, yeah, but I think that's going to be a next challenge for it.

Quantum Computing is quantum computing. It's not it. It's a different skill set, a different mechanism, and so skills, IT skills are getting harder to find. The resource pool is getting smaller, you're going to have a different type of resource tool needed for something like quantum computing, right?

Yeah, but sounds like you might end up with even more PhD scientists who are working in your organization as these things come along.

I think the other now cybersecurity is

it's a fascinating field, and it's going to get more interesting. I mean, right now, many of us put out phishing tests to try and get people to understand don't click or you shouldn't click. Now with the

AI capability to fake videos, for example, or voices, now you have to start thinking about, how could it be used maliciously, and how can you protect against it?

Yeah, and so all that takes energy to think about good just thinking about it, you have to ultimately come up with solutions to come to identify it, and once you've identified competitors,

there's a lot of organizations out there looking at this, they're going to be the

extremely in demand in the future. But these are the type of areas that don't necessarily advance your business, but they absolutely could derail it if you don't think about it. Yeah, yeah.

But to keep your business advancing, there are things that you have to be thinking about and planning ahead for essentially,

okay, well, my wrap up question, and actually, really one of my favorite questions of these interviews, is to ask you to share what you've learned about your own leadership style in these last few years, starting out as a somewhat reluctant 娇色导航who is now been six years in the job and very successful at it, and bringing home all kinds of industry awards for that your tech teams are delivering.

What do you have to share with other other IT leaders kind of coming up the ladder. What sort of lessons, things that you wished maybe you knew 10 years ago, that you know now. What have you got for us on that? Yeah, I mean, it's a great question.

I think the way I would answer that is more about trusting your gut,

but verify Have you got the right team?

I think part of that is recognizing the 娇色导航role is so broad these days, if you try and do it all, you're going to fail.

So you have to, you have to figure out, okay, who are you going to trust, and who you're going to bring on board to your team, who you're going to delegate to, and get comfortable with it.

And one of the toughest things, and particularly if you're promoted from within the ranks, is to

give up the job you were doing and focus on the job you need to do right now,

I

got very comfortable with that, but a lot of my effort actually went into working with my own team to say, No, as you get promoted, the expectation isn't to keep doing what you're doing and more.

It's to figure out, okay, how do you do the new job that you were promoted into, and how do you develop your team? So I think

my biggest takeaway would be, if you're going into the role thinking you're going to solve it all yourself, it's going to be challenging. If you're going into the role thinking that you're going to get the perfect solution each time, it's going to be really challenging.

It's a matter of selecting those areas that really matter,

identifying those areas where you you can't make progress for whatever reason there's a blockage in the decision rights or the way we're organized, and get comfortable enough to say, Okay, it's not enough. Never. It's not now, and go do something else. Yeah.

And biggest thing is, keep moving forward now, keep figuring out ways to always try and get your team to do better. Figure out ways that you can support your team to do things better.

And in my case, I very much put my success down to my team and to those I partner with. If I was doing it myself, we would be in trouble.

Well, well, and I, and as you know, I keep mentioning the CIO, 100 awards. Those are awards that are not given to you personally as the CIO.

Those are awards for your team, but somebody has to be the one who gets them together and says, you know, let's apply for this award here.

Because we're doing great work, and I've just sort of, one of the things I've always loved about that whole awards program is that it honors the work that teams are doing, and kind of underscores, underscores what you just said. So :14 I would agree.

I would agree. Well, thank you very much. It's really been a delight talking with you.

I feel like I've learned so much about the biopharma industry and all the way that all the accomplishments and the things you're doing there at Regeneron, so I really thank you for joining me today, Bob. Thank you.

Thanks, Maryfran, okay, and thanks also to our audience for dialing in and listening to this, either as an audio podcast or as video you're tuning in. You can tune in on LinkedIn, where this interview will be posted, and also on the cio.com website and on our YouTube channel.

Cio leadership live is available as an audio podcast wherever you find your podcast. And I hope you enjoyed listening in on my conversation with Bob McCowan the global 娇色导航of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.

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