Sell mobility to your board by use case, not novelty says pharma IT boss

Regulatory obstacles need that harder level of push, says Wei Wang

Introducing enterprise mobility into the enterprise is less about impressing stakeholders with technology and far more about proving use cases, pharmaceutical firm Allergan's IT chief Wei Wang told delegates at Computing's Enterprise Mobility and Application Management 2015 conference yesterday.

The EMEA IS director at Allergan told delegates that he used his previous experience of "really cool digital innovations" at Proctor and Gamble to introduce provable use cases for technology, rather than just trying to blind the board with science.

"A big challenge has been convincing the business that mobility delivers value," said Wang.

Delivering value, explained Wang, is a particular challenge in the pharmaceutical sector, due to heavy regulations.

"You can't really develop social media because of regulatory obstacles," he said, before describing an unusually tough model as an obstacle for change. "The EU has a ‘physician value transfer' in place, so across the EU every single physician would be tracked on how much value they have received from pharma companies - even down to a cup of coffee.

"So it's a huge business intelligence and reporting challenge."

Regulation, Wang explained, also leads to low agility.

"It can take six months to approve even a simple process, with every permutation of an emailed list of suggestions being heavily vetted and explored," he said.

A reliance on the "sales wrap" is another particular problem for pharmaceuticals, Wang explained - the belief that only direct personal contact with a customer is effective. Only two per cent of interaction took place in the digital domain when Wang arrived, a figure that he has now risen to 6.5 per cent by a tight focus on the issue.

Financial pressures mean that the sales force must cut costs, Wang explained, saying that not only is it cheaper to restrict sales people to one device each but that this has also enhanced their ability to build relationships, as everything they need is in one place.

As a result, iPhone 5s and iPads now proliferate at Allergan. This, said Wang, has been responsible for reducing laptop dependency by 10 per cent initially over a year, with Microsoft's 2014 decision to push its Office suite to iPad "a very big factor" in helping Allergan in its journey towards slimming down to one device.

"[We] looked at the option of one device strategy in the past and are still reviewing this versus other options," said Wang.

But Wang believes digital Luddism at Allergan is now easing.

"I think it's changing," he said, explaining that the quality of sales engagement is now being measured via the mobile devices.

"They haven't really seen the stickiness factor yet," he said. "But the sales force are finding the relationship doesn't stop after the physical one ends."