Meet the transformation CIOs, currently leading their businesses into the digital future.
Explore their most important initiatives, leadership goals, and how they see their roles evolving in the near future.
This time, in CIO Insights, we feature Anders Romare, Chief Digital & Information Officer (CDIO), Senior Vice President at Global Digital, Data & IT at Novo Nordisk.
It’s all about the data
Whether it is a matter of implementing GenAI or preparing for the company’s future growth engines, CDIO at Novo Nordisk, Anders Romare, knows that it all comes down to the data.
At a time when the pharma giant has turned into a pharma titan that now accounts for 20% of Denmark’s GDP, he has succeeded in transforming the IT department of Novo Nordisk. The digital ambitions envisioned by CDIO, Anders Romare, and his team are bigger than ever,
“Our role and ambitions follow the three major priorities that Novo has for the future. As our current success largely relies on one single molecule, semaglutide, we need to prepare for the expiry of that patent somewhere around 2031. We therefore need to invest in R&D, build the ‘here-and-now’ manufacturing capacity for our inventions, and identify future growth engines. Digital data plays a vital part in all three priorities, so our role is vital for the future of the company.”
Taking out two years while getting a better molecule is a major shift in our perspective
Looking back on the journey which Anders started in 2018 when he became a part of Novo, bringing in experience from other major businesses such as Airbus and Volvo, he recalls that he quickly learned that the pharma business is not for impatient persons, but AI is increasingly speeding up processes,
“By its nature, drug discovery is a relatively long process with lots of testing that must ultimately be done in a lab and eventually on humans. However, using AI and various simulations, we can test even more prototypes – perhaps millions of variations instead of ten thousand – in computers before going into the lab, and we can do it quicker. Potentially, we can go from five years of drug discovery to maybe three years. Taking out two years while getting a better molecule is a major shift in our perspective and in our role at Global Digital.”
Obviously, AI already played a significant role in Novo’s production, but with GenAI, the company made some early decisions as for which tools could be available to the employees,
“We very quickly decided to block the external ChatGPT, Microsoft Co-pilot and similar applications and chose to internalize our own variant. We were very successful, and it now hovers around 50,000 unique users every day.”
“We need to be sure that we deliver something that is safe for the patient”
For Anders and his team, the most important AI tasks now evolve around the data feeding the AI processes,
“It’s all about the data, for instance eliminating bias and any poisoning of the algorithms. That is the reason that we started out applying AI in cases where we already trust the data. AI and GenAI are useless without data, so as a business, you need to get your “data house” in order as soon as possible for it to be valuable. It’s a massive task, because we sure have plenty of it. So our main focus is to make sure that our data can be shared, understood and, most importantly, trusted. We are a highly regulatory driven industry, and we need to be sure that we deliver something that is safe for the patient. “
Well into applying GenAI, Anders sees three horizons of value for Novo’s approach to AI, all of them already well on their way,
“First, there is the broader enterprise horizon where you can go into productivity gains for HR, for finance, for marketing and sales. Our processes can be done smarter using our versions of GenAI tools that are deployed across the company. We are looking at a potential productivity gain of around 15-30 percent.The other horizon is more functional: building more dedicated solutions, document summaries for patent databases, clinical trials and so on. This may result in reducing a process from a hundred days, in some cases, to five days. As mentioned, our third horizon is a rather game-changing value: reducing the time used on drug discovery.”
Formality in the organizational chart is not important to me
The focus on Novo’s strategy, priorities for the future and the AI horizons emerging in recent years has also meant a major change in Global Digital, Data & IT and in the perception of the department within the organization,
“When I joined, we were mainly a support function treading the path behind the leadership. Today, our approach reflects our ambition to be early adopters and sometimes even the forerunners whenever there is value for the company. The journey that Novo is on calls for a need for speed and a need to use technology to the best possible extent in that fast-forward mode. Today, we are part of much more business-related discussions, and we enter into dialogues much earlier on, shaping the future of the company. I am part of the extended leadership, but formality in the organizational chart is not important to me. It’s more important that my team and I have a seat around the table in all the necessary business functions and – most importantly – that we are actively proposing ideas, delivering value to the company.”
Energy, passion and respect for the individual
The change in Novo’s perspective and position in the market requires clear leadership, but Anders’ leadership values have been equally clear and consistent throughout the course of his career,
“My mission in my leadership was formed quite early on, and I adapted three core values early on in my Volvo days, and they still stick today: energy, passion and respect for the individual.
If you have energy and passion for what you do, you have no expiration date. When coaching younger people, I always tell them: follow your heart and passion, not an intellectual thought, through your career path. And the thing most important to me is: respect for the individual. I personally always start from a place of trust. No matter what role you have in a company, I believe that people want to do good and try hard. I get energy from meeting teams and listening to their ideas and to what they are passionate about. People are different, and it’s important to make room for them to be their best. Personally, I have been fortunate to have had leaders who inspired me in my own leadership, so it is also an aspiration of mine to be an inspiration to others and give back.”
24 hours in silence with nuns was a lesson in respect for people’s choices
When it comes to inspiration for evolving the role as CDIO and his leadership mission, Anders finds inspiration in, i.a., his network,
“Having a network like the CIO Transformation Board or my other very diverse networks is very important to me. They are places where I find inspiration, where I can share ideas and ask questions. My personal network is very varied and ranges from pharma CIO networks where you can talk about certain things – but obviously not everything – to others beyond pharma. I try to get inspiration from as many places as possible, also from the unlikely ones. Once in a previous job, I got the opportunity to do a more unconventional leadership activity. I went to a convent where I spent 24 hours in silence with nuns. It is very interesting what silence can do to your way of thinking and your mindset. When I was allowed to talk again, I had a talk with the abbess, and I told her about my life. I do believe that she thought my life was somewhat crazy with all my traveling and so on – and maybe I thought her life was a little crazy too – but it was also a lesson in respecting other people and their choices. So being open to learn from people outside my sphere and comfort zone is important to me.”
The decisions needed when leading the digital transformation of a pharma titan, however, are found inside Anders’ comfort zone,
“Some decisions naturally boil down to experience and leadership. And that’s the beauty of leadership – there is so much more to it than what you can read in a book. Being humble in the sense that you should be able to defend your decisions is also important to me, but you should also be ready to change them if they don’t pan out as you wanted or expected them to. Dialogues with my team and my managers are therefore very important. They give me more perspectives on which to base my decisions – or to reconsider them.
However, not shying away from difficult decisions, Anders sees a change in the nature of the decisions he needs to make as a leader,“I had a professor in economic history who claimed that the most turbulent time was in the past but that we tend to believe that the time we live in now is the most complicated. He exemplified with the big immigration to the US in the mid-19th century and early 20th century from Scandinavia that caused a massive loss of able work force and a mixed economic impact on Scandinavia. It was complicated and changed societies on each side of the Atlantic Ocean. So right now might not be the most complicated or turbulent of times in a historic perspective, but the major change in my opinion is how we see an accelerated speed of decision-making and a greater force in the impact of those decisions. That goes for my job too, especially with Novo being such a large company which such an impact on people’s lives and on society. It is challenging, but leaders learn to cope with challenges. To me personally, they are mostly fun and very rewarding.”
“Having a network like the CIO Transformation board or my other very diverse networks is very important to me”
The CIO Transformation Board
In the Danish ICT Industry Association (IT-Branchen), we have the CIO Transformation Board, which brings together the most visionary CIOs from Denmark’s large and medium-sized companies. These are CIOs from businesses where digitalization is a strategic part of the business — but where there is also a desire to do more than just digitalize.
We aim not only to highlight Denmark’s most talented CIOs and share experiences and best practices across industries, but also to set the agenda in the media and with politicians regarding Denmark’s and the business sector’s digital future.
The CIO Transformation Board is created for those who also want to help find the new balance between people and technology. For those who have a stance and want to help influence our green transition, address the skills shortage, and strengthen growth in Denmark.
