PODCAST | Sanofi, Global Data Strategy & Governance Lead: We Need To Be Compliant and Still Unleash the Potential of Data

Leonard Maganza: Hello, and welcome to the CDO magazine interview series. I am Leonard Maganza with Syniti and we are partnering with CDO magazine, MIT CDOIQ, and the International Society of Chief Data Officers. Today we have the pleasure of talking with Kiran Kodali, the Global Data Strategy & Governance Lead at Sanofi.

I want you to talk about the business objectives of the programs you're overseeing, maybe provide an example of how you're measuring them, and talk about business impacts and how you're measuring those on a program you're running now.

Kiran Kodali: If we talk specifically about my current role … we have broad programs within the data office. We call them key capabilities that we're trying to bring together to enable business on various fronts.

The mission of the office is to maximize the value from data and provide fast and seamless access to data and advanced analytics used to make key business decisions across the value chain. So, that's a whole lot of words, but that's sort of our mission as an office. But if you break it down, how does that really impact the business?

We had different challenges that were brought to us when the office formed. One of them is, as an example, we want to use clinical study data for research purposes. So, that is data for our primary use. But it's used exclusively for that use, and there's no consideration of using it for secondary purposes.

That's how, traditionally, most data processes were built. Our job right now is to decode why we are not able to share that data. What are the roadblocks? It could be related to compliance and regulations. Clinical data has patient data, so it is highly regulated and it involves compliance with various regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and other European laws.

So, for that reason, we need to understand how we can push ourselves to a point where we are still compliant yet unleashing some of the potential of what this data can do for the business. That's just one example. And the way we were thinking about measuring this specific use case is by understanding how many studies can be shared with the end-users, and understanding how many users are actually accessing this data for whatever business purpose.

And third is measuring the number of use cases that are actually using this data. So, this is just one example, but you could use the same concept whether you're trying to build a data catalog,  or whether you're trying to build a master data management. You should always be able to measure the end users' usage and the value that they're generating. 

Maganza: That's interesting. Sanofi is a very complex and diverse company with even a broader landscape. So, piggybacking on what you were discussing just now, how do you manage all the consumers that you have that are in-house? You can only service so much at one time. So how do you get everyone aligned and rallying on a priority basis?

Kodali: That's a good one. Sanofi is a really diverse organization just within the research and development business unit. We have six functions and each function has its own complexity. And when you try to stitch all of these together with global teams, you can imagine the scale of complexity.

The first thing we did was draw a chart of our stakeholders — their business roles,  what they do exactly — and we started putting together an operating model to engage with all these stakeholders. So, I think having a data strategy framework and an operating model are two key elements to getting this journey started. And fortunately, we were very successful. We got these business SMEs on board with us in the very beginning stages, and we explained our vision of what we are trying to achieve as a data office. Getting that buy-in upfront has been really supportive for us throughout this journey.

The way we prioritized is, we created a strategic decision-making body. We're composed of leadership from the individual business functions as well as the digital/IT organization. These folks were the people understanding the region and making the call on the prioritization of the initiatives we proposed. Prioritization obviously had to come from a baseline assessment that we did. So, as part of this operating model, we also did a baseline assessment to understand each of these functions at the level of maturity they were at. On a scale of zero to 10, some of them were at two, some of them were at five, and some of them were at eight. But it was really important for us to understand where they stood so that we could tailor the solutions accordingly.