The conviction that competitive differentiation will require effective digital initiatives has led many life-sciences companies to create a new leadership role, chief digital officer (CDO), to guide their digital initiatives.
To understand how these leaders see the digital future and how they are managing for success, we spoke to CDOs and their equivalents at ten pharma companies. These conversations suggest three imperatives for digital efforts: focus on the team applying the tools, not on the tools themselves; make bold, disruptive bets; and optimize the portfolio of initiatives to achieve company priorities, while taking finite resources into account.