During his three years as CIO of pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, David Smoley has been overseeing a massive insourcing effort.
When he joined the organization, AstraZeneca was outsourcing nearly 70% of the IT organization to about ten third-party providers.
He brought much of IT in-house at locations around the globe, including Chennai in India and Guadalajara, Mexico as well as creating technology labs in Silicon Valley, Cambridge UK, and Shanghai.
The payback from these efforts has been remarkable. “We saved hundreds of millions of dollars just bringing that work in,” Smoley says.
However, insourcing was only half the battle. The other half: moving most of the IT effort to the cloud.
AstraZeneca’s Business Case for the Cloud
As a large enterprise in a heavily regulated industry, AstraZeneca faced substantial internal resistance to moving to the cloud – but this institutional inertia didn’t deter Smoley. “We set some crazy goals,” he explains. “We’re going to be twice as good for half the cost.”
The starting point: addressing the existing mess. “Application development, maintenance, infrastructure, security, and help desk were all different vendors,” Smoley says. “It was incredibly complex. From a change perspective, the first thing we did was email.”
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/10/20/cloud-centered-it-transformation-at-astrazeneca/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, ServiceNow and Stantive are Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers.
