GSK Digital And Tech Chief Drives Innovation Across The Company

Karenann Terrell is the Chief Digital and Technology Officer of GSK, a British multinational pharmaceutical company with revenues exceeding £30 billion. On the CTO side of her role, she has responsibility for all technology regarding customers, employees, and how the company innovates, while on the CDO side, Terrell is responsible for GSK’s reinvention through digital data and analytics. She is a CIO multiple times over holding the post at Baxter International, DaimlerChrysler, and most recently, Walmart. 

In this interview, Terrell discusses GSK’s 40, 50, 10 framework for thinking about technology and digital’s impact. The company spends 40 percent of its efforts on what she refers to as digital as usual, which includes identifying cross-enterprise value contribution. GSK spends 50 percent of its time on digital reinvention its existing business, and it spends 10 percent of its time on the true disruption.

Terrell is also a board member of Pluralsight, LLC, a publicly traded online education company that offers a variety of video training courses for software developers, IT administrators, and creative professionals through its website. She discusses the benefits she gains from board membership. Additionally, we discuss why GSK’s CEO added the CDO role to her set of responsibilities rather than giving them to a new executive, how GSK has looks to mix an infusion of talent externally to complement skills that exist internally, and a variety of other topics. 

(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 32nd interview in my board-level CIO series. To read the prior interviews with the CIOs of companies such as General Motors, Workday, PepsiCo, Dow, and United Airlines, please click this link.To read future articles in the series, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)

Peter High: Could you describe your purview as the Chief Digital and Technology Officer of GSK?

Karenann Terrell: GSK is ahead of most companies when it comes to thinking about the digital and technology responsibilities, and I have a combined role. I have the typical role of the CIO, which includes responsibility for all technology regarding our customers, our employees, and how we innovate. On the CDO side, I am responsible for GSK’s reinvention through digital data and analytics. 

GSK has three businesses, which are the pharmaceutical business, the vaccines business, and the consumer healthcare business. I have responsibility for all of the technology and the digital reinvention across the three businesses and the enterprise.

High: There are several schools of thought on the CDO and whether it will have legs or not. Is the title important as a means of calling out the change that you were hoping to enact?

Terrell: I believe adding that as a remit to the technology organization was an intentional decision by our CEO. This judgment signaled the importance of the digital transformation and the digital enterprise. I believe the separation of the two can sometimes slow down the ability to scale the opportunities that you find in digital data and analytics. We certainly wanted to have speed because there is a great deal of change taking place in the healthcare business regarding our customers, our patients, and our business in general.

High: Could you provide some examples of how technology is changing the experience for each of your three constituent groups?

Terrell: Our framework for thinking about technology and digital’s impact is 40, 50, and 10.

High: You previously told me about the need for IT to get out in front of the business and to be headlights. There are many constituents inside and outside the company that you need to contemplate when you are shining those headlights. Can you talk a bit about that method?

Terrell: Given the digitizing of every business that our customers interact with, we know that we must organize around agile principles. We have to be able to think about how we move from project to product, and we have to look at our supplier base in a digital ecosystem way because that is how the digital and data-inspired world is moving. Those are three incredibly important components of the tech transformation. As the business starts to operate using more agile principles towards a product, we are thinking about how they will move into a digital ecosystem. 

[Chief Scientific Officer] Hal Barron has a Silicon Valley approach to how he thinks about reinventing discovery in science times technology times culture. Our ability to move at speed with him requires us to reinvent our own business through that lens. It is a practice for us ahead of the speed at which the business will want us to move, and those have been terrific learning experiments. Learning at scale changes the tech organization where we are starting to see GSK become a much more agile, product-oriented, digital ecosystem.

High: You have spoken about the importance of being agile, rather than just doing agile. Could you talk about the cultural implications of that statement?

Terrell: I believe that agile at scale is a big paradigm shift for companies, and it was certainly true in the retail business [at Walmart]. Agile principles do not always fit into the category of scrum-based design from the customer orientation, or digital native platforms that can be built in software engineering from the ground-up. That does not mean that designing user experiences with the end customer in mind and the ability to deliver value in small sprint time frames is not possible, even in some of our more monolithic legacy platform work. Even if you cannot fully embrace a DevOps model, it is critical to start that mindset change. I am gratified that you see that cascade of thinking about being able to fail fast and working in a sprint orientation while searching for value to be delivered. This is not just headlights from tech anymore. Instead, it is into our business, even in areas where we have more traditional technology platforms that do not fit DevOps.

The doing agile is the one everybody is familiar with. This involves software engineering and brand new ground-up platforms that go into DevOps in sprint-based cycles where you reorganize and take a great deal of skill. There is a great deal of skill transformation required in this area. As the CDO, I believe there is more value that comes quickly in the being agile side of our business while we are cascading the modernization to doing agile.

High: As you thought about the 40, 50, 10 model, and as the company has declared the importance of digital, what sorts of new roles or skills have you been hiring for? Further, as somebody who has been a CIO multiple times over in the U.S. at Walmart, Baxter International, and DaimlerChrysler, could you talk about the United Kingdom’s market for technology versus the United States’ market?

Terrell: GSK is a global multinational with products and customers across the world, so we have the world at our disposal to look at how and where we will do development, where we will support technology, and where we will draw skills. That said, we still make deliberate decisions about core locations so that we get talent density. Some of the skills need to be co-located with our businesses in order to get speed. This is especially true for new skills around software engineering, user design centricity, and data and analytics. This is even more relevant when you start to think of data and analytics as a product that is informing and infusing a data-oriented culture in the company. We have a big presence in Philadelphia, Raleigh, Poznan in Poland, and Wavre in Belgium, which is where our vaccines business is.

Regarding the skills transformation internally, we have had success, but we have not yet been extremely successful. We are hiring from the external market as well. Interestingly, we are not just hiring at the entry-level at the organization. While we have always had a skills infusion from our early talent programs, we are seeing more mid-level hiring. This component is necessary for individual contributors with software engineering skills.

We had a squad of technologists in London join us about eight months ago, and they are lifting and shifting inside of GSK. They provided us a huge momentum boost because they are platform thinkers, and they came from the tech business. The technologies are an incredible accelerator of the internal skills transformation because everyone knows how good will look, and they are incredibly humble human beings in the internal teaching. We all have to recognize that there is a mix from hiring from the outside and skilling the folks in a transformative way internally.

High: You were recently appointed to the board of Pluralsight. It is exciting to see a greater number of people with technology backgrounds joining boards of companies. Could you talk about how that came about? How do you believe a technologist adds value to boards, and what have you drawn from that experience that you take back to the office?

Terrell: My board appointment was a bit serendipitous. I met a venture capitalist who was on the board, and they told me they were expanding the board. Specifically, they were interested in someone who was in the heart of the digital and skills transformation. Pluralsight is the world’s premier platform of the skills transformation in order to move towards the digital economy. As they have gone through an IPO, it has made me a much better leader internally in my post. My empathy for our board members is much different than it was before. Specifically, my ability to understand how to be immensely clear in my communication with the board is better. This is especially important in today’s age with the enterprise risk around cybersecurity and the work in digital data and analytics. My remit takes me to the board frequently to talk about that.

I hesitate to say that I encourage all leaders in tech to get board positions because it is not always possible in terms of the governance of companies. However, there is an enormous opportunity to look at companies through the lens of the board so you become more empathetic and skilled with your communications with the board [of your own company]. I wish I had done this as I started my CIO journey 10 years ago. I have had a terrific experience working with venture capitalists, and there is a woman from Google on the board. It is a tremendous transformation for me to look at a digital native tech company, such as Pluralsight. That said, it does take a solid deal of time.

High: As you look to the future, which trends are beginning to make their way onto your personal roadmap?

Terrell: I could not be more excited about what technology will do for driving innovation in healthcare. For us, that is in the discovery side, the acceleration of our discoveries of genetics-aligned medicines, and what will happen as we advance vaccines through our system. There is so much we can do to better serve our patients through technology. This includes the technology of being able to move to virtual trials and the wearables that will completely change how our patients will engage with us regarding the medicines they use. I am not talking about digital as the drug. Instead, I am talking about digital-enhanced capabilities in clinical trials, in our respiratory business, and in how we do a better job of looking at real-world evidence to expand the populations of people who could be served by our medicines. It is strange to hear a CTO not talking about technology, but somebody will listen to this in six months and say, “Oh, that technology was so six months ago.” That is the way our world is changing. Looking at consent-driven genetics that can be used, the mapping of the genome through all of that, and how that will change the healthcare business is the reason I will get up every single morning and work all the way through the evening. That is truly changing the business of pharmaceuticals and healthcare.

Peter High is President of  Metis Strategy , a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book is  Implementing World Class IT Strategy . He is also the author of  World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs .  Peter moderates the Technovation podcast series. He speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.