Summary.
Over the past decade, Novartis has invested heavily in digital transformation. As the Swiss pharmaceutical giant moved its technology infrastructure to the cloud and invested in data platforms and data integration, it recruited AI specialists and data scientists to build machine-learning models and deploy them throughout the firm. But even as the technical teams grew, managers from across the business—sales, supply chain, HR, finance, and marketing—weren’t embracing the newly available information, nor were they thinking much about how data could enhance their teams’ work. At the same time, the data scientists had little visibility into the business units and could not easily integrate data into day-to-day operations. As a result, the investments resulted in only occasional successes (in some aspects of the R&D process, for example) while many pilots and projects sputtered.