by Peter High, published on Forbes
9-21-15
When I last spoke with Andi Karaboutis a little over a year ago, she was the CIO of Dell. Shortly after we spoke, she moved to $10 billion, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotechnology firm, Biogen as the Executive Vice President of Technology and Business Solutions, a role definitively above the CIO role. She also joined the board of Advance Auto Parts, the $10 billion provider of automotive aftermarket parts based in Roanoke, Virginia.
I was interested to learn how Karaboutis managed the transition to a new, dynamic industry, to a broader set of responsibilities, what those responsibilities entailed, and how she pursued the path to board membership. Exemplifying the best characteristics of curious and humble autodidact, Karaboutis realized that she needed to learn the language of biotechnology so that she could speak lucidly with her new colleagues about the opportunities they hoped to seize and the issues they hoped to resolve. She also recognized that with her growing responsibilities coupled with her being on the audit committee of the Advance Auto Parts board both required a greater familiarity with finance, so she took a course on the topic. This training has served her well, as she notes herein, and has allowed her to achieve level of what she refers to as “professional athleticism.”
Our conversation also covered technical innovation in the biotechnology setting, including the topic of the “Internet of Me.”
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 23rd interview in the CIO’s First 100 Days series, and the 14th interview in the Board Level CIO series. To read past interviews with executives in either of these series, click this link for the CIO’s First 100 Days, and this link for the Board Level CIO. To read future articles in either series, please click the “Follow” link to the upper left part of this page.)
Peter High: You are the Executive Vice President of Technology and Business Solutions at Biogen. Could you take a moment to describe the areas under your purview in that role?
Andi Karaboutis: I have been in the role for about a year. It is made up of several areas, but the key three areas are around the core technology of IT and enterprise IT that you find in most companies, which is technology for the capabilities of the company – everything to operate the company from telecommunications all the way through to systems of records and systems of engagement.
The second big component is around scientific computing, which you will find in biotechnology/bio-pharma companies, and it is computing that will help us with more insights, more biological targets, and marrying data sets together that are interesting to our scientists. For example, if you think about genomics and genetics, longitudinal data, phenotypical data and things like that, to help with what is a very big goal now in the life sciences/healthcare industry around personalized medicine and better targeting molecules to help with therapeutics. So it is a very focus, in a nutshell, Peter.
The third component is to meaningfully disrupt the business with technology very akin to some of the internal capabilities, but, again, focused around the external environment of our business. And these could be wearables, consumables, ingestables, and things like that. So there is Internet of Things, “Internet of Me” as we call it here where, again back to personalized medicine, but the second component focusing heavily on data and analytics and informatics and scientific computing. There are a few other components of which I am responsible for, but those are the key three areas of the role. So, as you can see, it is beyond the internal enterprise IT capabilities.
High: Having gotten to know, advise, study, and interview a great number of people now who have made this transition from CIO to something definitively beyond CIO, this is the first example, that I know of, of somebody who went from CIO within one company to a beyond-CIO set of responsibilities at a new company and a new industry. How did it occur to you and to Biogen to pursue this broader set of responsibilities in this new organization and in a new industry?
Karaboutis: Great question. Interestingly enough, Biogen’s CEO, George Scangos, and the board had gone out to Silicon Valley and one of the board meetings that we do every year is beyond typical board material (though that is done at every meeting). They looked at some of the areas that can help take Biogen into the next generation and help disrupt the business in a positive way, as well as potentially the whole biotech industry. They recognized that technology is not a long pole in the tent, but something that has progressed to the point where it can help this industry through some of the data, Big Data, analytics, and technology as we talked about earlier. And that is where they said we need a senior leader to come in and go beyond the CIO role and try to disrupt, again, in the three ways that I talked about before. So it is to the credit of the vision of the CEO and the board that the role was created. Finding somebody outside of biotech was viewed as an opportunity to bring someone in, and obviously, being from Dell, I brought technology with me from a capability perspective of the industry, to bring somebody in with different thinking, fresh thinking, etc., and help be unencumbered in how do we apply certain capabilities to this business.
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