00:00 Welcome to CIO Leadership Live. I’m Lee Rennick, executive director of CIO communities for cio.com, and we’re here right now at the CIO 100 Symposium and Awards. And I’m with Bob McCowan, senior vice President and Chief Information Officer, Regeneron. Thanks so much for joining me here today, Bob. It’s been a really active few days here at the conference.
00;00;30;07 – 00;00;55;07
Unknown
Could you please introduce yourself and maybe tell us a little about your current role? Yeah, absolutely. It’s great to meet you, Lee. So Bob McCowan, I’m the CIO at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, and, I’ve been in the role six years. My role there is fairly traditional for CIO. But unlike the title, it’s, covering things from data to transformation to, technology.
00;00;55;07 – 00;01;18;49
Unknown
So it’s a pretty all encompassing role. I actually joined the company prior, so I was promoted to CIO from within Regeneron, which has its advantages. Right? Some disadvantages. Right. But having run the infrastructure, we had started on a whole modernization program. So going in CIO, I was really able to pick up on that and move forward.
00;01;18;54 – 00;01;38;24
Unknown
Yeah. And a lot of CIOs talk about the relationship they have the C-suite, the other C-suite and the board of directors. So certainly it seems like you had that knowledge base come in into the company that’s been put up into the role of the CIO. Yeah, absolutely. It definitely helped. And I think, Regeneron’s a founder led organization.
00;01;38;24 – 00;02;00;25
Unknown
Right. They’re still there. Right. And a terrific job. Yeah. And it creates a culture, I think, where, there’s a little bit more risk taking than other organizations I work for because of the science based approach and the whole, approach is now you do well by doing good, right? That creates, type of excitement that I just didn’t see in some other organizations.
00;02;00;30 – 00;02;23;03
Unknown
Oh, fantastic. Well, congratulate to Regeneron for winning the CIO 100 Award. We’re having the gala tonight. It’s going to be fantastic to celebrate all of this amazing technology that people like yourselves are really embracing and pushing forward in their organizations. Could you tell me a little bit about the award winning project? It’s called Centralized Data Platform Using Data to Uplift Science, so I’d love to learn more about it.
00;02;23;08 – 00;02;52;39
Unknown
Yeah, absolutely. And, the centralized data platform is, I guess, the result of a lot of investments in the past few years. But, it’s at the simplest level, what we do is we research and find drug candidates. We, then go to what we call PMP, which is, pre manufacturing, and they learn how to scale it up, but they then have to transfer it into, tech transfer to manufacturing at large scale.
00;02;52;50 – 00;03;16;36
Unknown
Right. And so there’s a whole process from how you take it from research to the, to what we call AIOps industrial operations. And we have 12 FDA approved products. Right. Clearly, this group know what they’re doing. Yeah. But the opportunity arose to really go back and look and look at the process and how they engaged and what this does.
00;03;16;36 – 00;03;36;41
Unknown
It creates a essentially a data platform that takes all the data from those processes. Provides it in a way that, each person in the step of the process can get access to it. Yeah. And in doing that, we started to see that those groups sometimes spoke a different language. They talked about the same data, but in different ways.
00;03;36;42 – 00;03;57;18
Unknown
Right. The way they transferred data was now legacy based, PowerPoint slides. Excel. Yeah, yeah. Or you needed to know who to talk to. And so by capturing this data in the platform, we simplified that process and made it much smoother. And, and and the biggest success, to be honest, was bringing those individuals and subject matter experts together.
00;03;57;23 – 00;04;17;10
Unknown
And it was able help them. Yeah. Able to help them, empower them to put this program in place. It sounds fantastic. Now, a lot of great outcomes as a result of this. Yes. And, we’re looking at other areas we can take. Well, it sounds fantastic. And congratulations. Well, I do speak with a lot of CEOs.
00;04;17;10 – 00;04;34;21
Unknown
I interview them and we have roundtables, and we talk a lot about cloud and edge to cloud computing and just managing the data. Right. Making sure it’s in the right place. Sometimes, you know, people are talking to me about bringing data back on prem. I spoke to one person who said to me, we just don’t do that at all because of the way our business has been structured.
00;04;34;26 – 00;04;55;29
Unknown
But, you know, I would love to learn some of your process. And looking at central, this centralizing data and then, you know, looking at that productivity and process, any insights you could provide to other CIOs are tech leaders listening in. So not everyone might want to hear this, but it takes a long time. Yeah. And I mentioned earlier I was helping, modernize the infrastructure.
00;04;55;29 – 00;05;20;08
Unknown
Yeah. And a big part of that was actually transition to cloud. Right. We took a native cloud approach and moved probably 60, 70% of everything we do to cloud. But we did that very thoughtfully. So we identified what made sense to stay on premise. And then in the move to cloud, we also, refactored it and redesigned it to make sure we took the benefits.
00;05;20;12 – 00;05;41;24
Unknown
So once you get it into the cloud, you suddenly realize that you can deal with much bigger data sets. You can connect to data, right? This idea of connected data comes into play. And so when you start building on that and in fact this is our fourth CIO 100 award in five years. Wow. And when you go back and look at them all the same is data.
00;05;41;24 – 00;06;04;26
Unknown
Data right. Right. And so the approach we took was we’ve got to have that, data platform that is going to deal with all the ingestion with the quality issues. We’ve got to present the data in the right formats to different groups. Some of them are working with research data, others are clinical data or manufacturing with, regulatory reform.
00;06;04;27 – 00;06;35;45
Unknown
Right. Build on that. But it’s really going back and taking a very thoughtful approach to understanding what the process is, how it’s being used, who’s who’s using it. And then the other aspect is, be prepared to, re-engineer re-engineering because the technology is moving. So, right, process is moving so fast that, as an example, we had an award for high performance computer in the cloud.
00;06;35;50 – 00;06;51;49
Unknown
And since then we have made adjustments to it, but it looks nothing like what it looked like three years ago. Right. And so you got to keep revisiting and also looking at how people are using it and deciding, is cloud still the answer, or does it make sense to bring it closer and, and bring it back in-house.
00;06;51;54 – 00;07;13;29
Unknown
So it’s it’s continually evaluated. What makes it so that is the thank you for those insights. Those are great insights that are shared because I speak about it all the time and it really does seem it adds day to day to day to, as you said. But it’s like now people are really honing in with it, especially with generative AI, because, they want to make sure they have the best data that they’re going to be using that on, right in their, in their space.
00;07;13;29 – 00;07;32;18
Unknown
So I appreciate that. Okay. So you said, your organization is founder driven and owned. And, we released a state of the CIO report. And in that survey, 79% of the CIO surveyed said that they have an educational partnership with the board and the C-suite. So I’d love your take on that. You know, the CIO is a business leader.
00;07;32;18 – 00;07;52;01
Unknown
And having that educational partnership, how are you managing that? So I think it works both ways, right? I personally went out and became an OECD certified. I’m part of it was nice. I wanted to think about what are the pressures there. There. Because if you think of what’s happened in the last few years, we had Covid 19.
00;07;52;01 – 00;08;17;16
Unknown
Yeah, everything. Yep. The SEC a few years back started putting much more rigor around things like cybersecurity. Yeah. So the board had to lean into cybersecurity. Now you have AI. And so just being able to understand how they’re thinking about it helps me shape about, how I message. All the boards are slightly different with, my own experience.
00;08;17;16 – 00;08;40;53
Unknown
Mostly I interact with the audit committee. So they’re very concerned about cybersecurity. So we do briefings on cybersecurity all the time. Some informal meeting, some outside. They’re very interested in AI. And, we use AI a lot. I think sometimes with generative AI, people see that it’s only two years old, but it’s been around a long time.
00;08;40;58 – 00;09;04;46
Unknown
But there is a lot of interest. So we are doing more presentations and more updates, some form of some information that. But I think, as a CIO, you have to put yourself in their shoes. Yeah. And I think the risks to the board members has increased. And now providing that oversight is, can be really challenging and such a dynamic world that we’re in today.
00;09;04;48 – 00;09;22;36
Unknown
Yeah. And I love the idea that you got your certification. I think that that that’s one thing I have not heard a lot of. So for anybody listening in, it probably really impacted on how you view their roles. Yeah. And it was partly because at times you get frustrated, right? You’re you’re thinking more of these questions coming from.
00;09;22;36 – 00;09;43;37
Unknown
Right. And so just being able to, step in their shoes a little bit, it helps. Yeah I really admire that. All right. Well, you did say you’re using generative AI a lot. You know, and when I speak to say how some are using it mainly internally for productivity within the business, and certainly you’ve done that.
00;09;43;42 – 00;10;10;50
Unknown
And I would just love to learn about what you’re seeing for like, trends into the end of the year and then maybe into 2025. So we’re using AI a lot generative, not so much. Right. But our approach to generative is we, believe there’s a lot of value in it, but the value is very different based on the industry here at, you know, our chief science officer, George, has made the comment that,
00;10;10;55 – 00;10;32;03
Unknown
AI is not going to replace scientists or the scientific approach. Right. But it will make a good scientist even better. Yeah. And so I think a lot of the things we’re looking at are practical examples of where it can help. And one very simple example is, within our industry, you have lab notebooks where you have to track everything.
00;10;32;08 – 00;10;53;21
Unknown
And historically they were done on paper. Right. So we have identified some paper lab. Yeah. Lab books and, there’s probably a wealth of information in there, but it’s not in an easily accessible format. And so where we’re using generative AI is to, scan and interpret those and read them, and it’s dealing with, sort of handwritten notes.
00;10;53;21 – 00;11;12;26
Unknown
It’s dealing with, pictures and sketches, but it’s presenting it in a format now that we can now expose out to many others and, capture it. And while the general AI maybe doesn’t understand at all, it’s able to target in a way that others will be able to come in and look at it and see if there’s value.
00;11;12;31 – 00;11;31;38
Unknown
Yeah, that’s really interesting. So it’s looking at historic data and improving that for resources for the whole company. Absolutely. And I think this is where the combination of cloud, big data and bringing it together. Yeah, is allowing you to go back and look at data. In the past that you may not have seen at least correlations. Right.
00;11;31;43 – 00;11;54;01
Unknown
And we saw that actually with the PMP, Ph.D. up situation, we took ten years of their historical data. And that historical data is now through ML. They’re identifying, traits or indicators actually help influence some of the things we’re doing today. So there’s a huge amount of wealth in that historical data. Yeah. And I mean, I was talking to the CTO of Opendoor, Raji Subramanian.
00;11;54;01 – 00;12;16;02
Unknown
She was talking about organizations like their organization uses. ML has used a lot of AML, and now they’re saying this is a great opportunity to add this edition of the AI to create more efficiencies with the data and understand the data a little bit better. But answering your question about where we are in that, yeah, I think, there’s been a lot of hype because of the excitement.
00;12;16;07 – 00;12;43;09
Unknown
And I think now we’re into the reality. Right. And, some of my colleagues are taking these huge, programs and almost betting the house on it. Right. I think others are coming back to now, what we’ve doing is what has made a successful. Yeah. Can, reshape some of the things we do, but let’s let’s find those practical ways that can accelerate work.
00;12;43;09 – 00;13;03;19
Unknown
We’re doing enhance the work we’re doing. And I think, start there, build the capability, build a muscle, and then grow. And, I do believe there’s huge value in generative AI. Now you’ve got to use your imagination as to where that value is, but I think it’s going to be, a multi-year journey as we figured out.
00;13;03;21 – 00;13;12;57
Unknown
Well, I appreciate that advice that you’re providing to anybody who’s listening in. And thank you so much for joining me here today, Bob. I really appreciate it. I appreciate you asking me. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks.
Join Lee Rennick at the CIO100 with Bob McCowan, SVP & CIO, Regeneron, on CIO Leadership Live
