(US and Canada) John Thompson, Global Head, AI, and Rapid Data Lab, CSL Behring, speaks with Salema Rice, Global Data and Analytics leader, Global Managing Director, Applied Intelligence, Accenture, and CDO Magazine Editorial Board Member, about CSL Behring’s business, his role, and his career accomplishments.

CSL Behring is a biotechnology research company that produces life-saving therapies for rare diseases, influenza, and viruses. The company revolves around two operations. The largest is the plasma operation, which collects plasma from donors worldwide and produces flu vaccines.

Thompson heads advanced analytics and artificial intelligence for the entire corporation, helping business stakeholders. He works with a team of data scientists, data visualization experts, data engineers, and application developers.

Sharing more about the data approach at CSL Behring, he says it swings back and forth between centralized and decentralized and vertical and horizontal. The organization has a Center of Excellence but also loans data scientists and application developers to different parts of the organization.

Thompson notes that it works as an ecosystem for problem-solving. The Community of Practice consists of 15 special interest groups run by volunteers interested in topics ranging from statistics to biopharmaceuticals, vigilance, data visualization, etc. These groups meet every quarter and feed into the Community of Practice, which feeds into the Center of Excellence.

Thompson, sharing his most significant career accomplishments, says he started in the late 80s and was a part of a team that created the conform dimensional model. He was also on a team that built predictive modeling market language for model portability. He also mentions his second book, “Building Analytics Teams.”