The role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) is undergoing a fundamental transformation. No longer confined to managing cost centres and ensuring operational efficiency, CIOs are stepping into the spotlight as strategic partners, co-creating business value and aligning technology with core business strategies. Deloitte's CIO Leadership Study highlights how CIOs are increasingly taking on responsibilities that extend beyond traditional IT.¹ This shift is particularly profound in life sciences. Our deep experience supporting life science CIOs as they navigate these transitions and harness the power of emerging technologies provides unique insights into their crucial role in driving business growth and competitive advantage through strategic technology alignment - a topic we’ll explore further in this blog.

Redefining the CIO role in life sciences

The life sciences landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Deloitte’s Life sciences and healthcare predictions indicate that emerging technologies, such as AI-powered drug discovery platforms, advanced genomics, personalised medicine, and digital therapeutics, are driving transformative advancements, leading to faster and more cost-effective drug development and treatments.² However, harnessing this power demands a fundamental shift in how organisations approach their technology strategy, placing the CIO at the heart of this transformation.

Traditional, reactive approaches to technology planning and capability building, often result in siloed technology investments that fail to deliver on their full potential, as highlighted in Deloitte's article on Measuring Value from Digital Transformation.³ This piecemeal approach hinders progress and prevents organisations from fully capitalising on disruptive opportunities.

CIOs need to be strategic leaders, driving technological innovation to unlock, track, and realise the business value across the entire sector. This is even more pressing given the increased AI investments across the life sciences value chain and the potential returns that can be made on this investment.⁴ Today's CIO needs to demonstrate tangible value from technology investments, directly linking these investments to improved patient outcomes, accelerated research and drug discovery, efficient and resilient supply chain and operations, and improving overall business performance.

Exploiting key shifts in the life science industry

The evolving role of the CIO is more than a mere shift in responsibility; it's a fundamental reimagining of their purpose within the organisation. To effectively navigate this new landscape, life sciences CIOs should carefully consider these four key shifts: 

1. Transforming operating models

Life sciences organisations are prioritising operating model transformation to combat rising drug and device development costs.⁵ While traditionally focused on cost-cutting, a new era of AI-powered enablement is emerging. Centres for Enablement (C4Es) are breaking down silos, empowering business users to innovate with technology. Generative AI (GenAI) is also transforming IT, automating tasks across the software development lifecycle, from code generation to testing and documentation. CIOs are well positioned to ensure technology enables an innovative, connected, and patient-centric healthcare ecosystem.

2. Responding to rapid evolution in R&D and commercial functions

Commercial and R&D functions are evolving at an unprecedented pace post-pandemic, driven by factors such as increased regulatory scrutiny, the rise of personalised medicine, and the growing demand for value-based care. For example, decentralised clinical trials demand robust, secure data management platforms for real-time data handling from dispersed participants, all while adhering to stringent privacy regulations. Similarly, personalised patient care requires sophisticated, next best action-centric, and personalised yet privacy-conscious CRM systems. CIOs who can anticipate these trends, ensuring data security and compliance while fostering innovation, will be essential for organisations to remain competitive and agile. 

3. Enabling speed and adaptability

CIOs can improve agility by championing technologies that enable swift responses to new challenges. For example, leveraging cloud computing for flexible infrastructure allows companies to scale computing resources for R&D workloads up or down as needed, ensuring they can quickly adapt to changing demands. The need to digitise bio-samples, create interoperability of data in R&D systems and AI-powered platforms are proving invaluable in automating and accelerating clinical trial recruitment and data analysis. By automating early patient identification and matching, these platforms can significantly reduce enrolment time, leading to faster drug development and ultimately, quicker access to life-saving treatments for patients.

4. Shaping new business models: Pioneering the future of life sciences

Beyond optimising existing models, CIOs can help shape new business models using disruptive technologies to create new markets. As the portfolio expands to include novel modalities such as cell and gene therapies, the CIOs need to question the IT investments needed across commercial, R&D and supply chain. This could involve incubating digital health startups, forging strategic partnerships with data and tech companies, embracing a GenAI enabled tech operating model and reimagining human-centred experiences in the business. By encouraging innovation and strategic risk-taking, CIOs can help unlock value and establish their organisations as leaders in next-generation healthcare.

The investment challenges CIOs face

Making informed investment decisions that deliver tangible value is paramount, yet numerous challenges can hinder this objective:

• Misaligned technology strategy and roadmaps: Siloed IT department limit the CIO's ability to align technology with business goals, leading to a perception of IT as a cost centre. CIOs need to balance efficiency gains from innovation with system stability and security risks.
• Lack of enterprise-wide visibility: Without a holistic understanding of business priorities, investments, and interdependencies, it is difficult for CIOs to prioritise and optimise technology spending, potentially leading to wasted resources and missed opportunities.⁶

• Demonstrating the full value of technology investments: Traditional financial metrics like return on investment (ROI) fail to capture the full value of technology investments. While ROI remains important, CIO’s need to measure and articulate the impact of these investments on key dimensions such as improved patient outcomes, differentiated customer experience, talent productivity gains, increased operational efficiency, accelerated innovation, and enhanced legal-financial-regulatory compliance.^7,8

Navigating the challenges

Keeping pace with rapid technological advancements, requires CIOs to adopt a proactive and strategic mindset. The following pillars detail key areas where CIOs should consider focusing their efforts:

Figure 1. The Strategic Cascade Framework to support strategic and business-aligned decision making

Conclusion

The life sciences industry is experiencing rapid technological disruption across the value chain, with AI-investments and digitisation providing accelerated transformation opportunities. Determining which technologies are revolutionary and driving value enables CIOs to determine the right sequence and the full value of technology investments. By focusing on simulating the business benefits and building the right value realisation backbone for the tech investment portfolio, CIOs and tech leaders can be strategic board level partners in making investment choices rather than simply executing the business ask. A real-world value driven mindset, breaking down organisational silos, partnering with start-ups and research institutions, and putting measured bets in the emerging technologies can drive innovation, enable new business commercial models and improve patient outcomes.

To drive the greatest impact, CIOs should ask themselves these key questions: 

By answering these questions, life sciences CIOs can get closer to unlocking the transformative power of technology, driving innovation, improving patient outcomes, and shaping a healthier and more sustainable future for the industry.

Get in touch

Niyati Nagar
Director, CIO Advisory & Tech Transformation in Life Sciences(Europe)
nnagar@deloitte.co.uk

Amit Kumar
Senior Manager, Life Sciences
amitykumar@deloitte.co.uk