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Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District is a renowned urban innovation hub supporting ventures and startups tackling key challenges in the health, cleantech, fintech and enterprise sectors. And André Allen, MaRS’ VP of IT, chief privacy officer and CISO, is at the center of its growth, ambition, and success.

“I’ve been with MaRS for just over a year and a half and I’m responsible for all aspects of information technology, including business systems, software engineering systems, operations, service, desk information security and privacy,” he says. “We have a fairly complex business and multiple business units within it, and I try to keep up with all the asks and requirements they bring us.”

Amassing lessons learned and experience in different industries over decades, Allen has shaped his career in his own unique way, now at the center of so much innovation and knowledge sharing at MaRS. There’s always some variance with CIOs or senior tech leaders in their individual business journeys, and skills acquired, but away from the technology itself, and its implementation or product investment, is the search for diverse and inclusive talent to build teams. Being in a leadership role, this is central to what motivates Allen in the face of ongoing tech challenges in Canada surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion, or opportunity (DEI and DEO).

“Being able to hire people globally means you need to be able to integrate them and make them happy,” he says. “We’re lucky at MaRS, and from the top, that everyone’s really bought into diversity, equity and inclusion. That’s something we’re continuing to navigate across all industries.”

CIO.com’s Lee Rennick recently spoke with Allen about opportunity, inclusion and putting in the small efforts now to effect big change in the future. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On entrepreneurism: I feel blessed to be at MaRS because there’s so much energy and innovation happening. And you see smart people around you taking small, burgeoning ideas into ongoing businesses. AI, or specifically machine learning (ML), is certainly the leading trend, be it clean tech or environmental technology, or just systems building smart new systems or smart cities. The use of AI and ML is a real catalyst for a whole new set of industries and companies, and there are some bright entrepreneurs thinking up new ways of doing things, looking through large datasets trying to find patterns and anomalies. We love being in the space we’re in. Many of our ecosystem members do great work, harnessing these datasets, so they need access to things like cloud, which has enabled some of those things.

On equal opportunity: DEO and DEI are passions of mine and I think now they’re economic realities in that the pool of people—trying to find skilled technology people or skilled knowledge workers—is shrinking. And for me, if we only hire people that looked or thought like us, that further limits the pool, and the world becomes even smaller. So the advice I give is DEI is more than just something you should do. It’s something that’s going to help your business in thinking through how you get new talent because of the pool of resources. We’re also involved with an organization called CILAR, and they have a good approach. It’s really the power of one, that’s the thinking, in that one individual can reach out to help another get forward. There may not be an immediate payback for you, but there is for that individual and for the pool of resources in total. And once these people integrate into our environment, you get the opportunities. By looking through one lens, you may not pick up the nuances for different cultures or different groups. So it’s important you bring those people in. Doing that, though, is the hard part. It has to be something you believe in and that there’s a direct benefit for your business as well as a social aspect.

On roles: Effective CIOs or leaders need to be more broad based. It can’t just be about the bits and bytes. I think that ship sailed long ago. You need to be close to the business and understand the value providing for that business. Getting involved in diverse points of view comes into play in order to look at the business and its priorities in a different light, and bring it to the table and have a voice there. I certainly think it’s a lot of hats that we juggle, but they’re necessary hats, and the technology and data managing as a discrete function of managing private security all overlaps. When I first joined MaRS, I wondered how I’m going to tackle all of these things together. Some of these functions are held discreetly, but it’s worked out quite well for us because the same things I’m looking at from a data and privacy perspective have implications for security, and how we build and support systems. So while there are multiple hats, having a supportive management team makes all the difference.

On the professional journey: I’ve been in IT for over 30 years. I started in systems operations, then moved through the infrastructure, managing local area networks, and then onto midrange systems from HP and IBM. Over that time, I purposely worked in different verticals and my belief then was as it is now: seeing a breadth of industries and different technologies helps good technology people adapt. So be it consumer packaged goods, banking or telco, I believe they all form the basis of your knowledge as you learn different things from different industries. It also helped being able to challenge what some people may view as sacred cows. Challenging that over the years has brought a broad view of different technologies. It’s important you understand the industry you’re in to service your customers. But challenging some of those holy grails does yield some interesting new outcomes.

CIO, Diversity and Inclusion, Innovation, IT Leadership, Startups

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Change and instability seem like the only constants for brands for over two years now. And while those conditions may have made for a rocky road, they also provided brands an opportunity to explore new ways to engage with customers regardless of where they were in their customer journey. Brands capitalized on this opportunity to expand and enhance the path to purchase – from content development and delivery to adapting to consumers’ constantly evolving digital behaviors.

These new behaviors prompted brand marketers to develop new types of content and delivery channels designed to meet customers in the moment. Consumers quickly adapted to a new content-rich environment that provided information curated for their needs with a single click or search, which pushed brands to produce more content to feed consumer appetites.

Creating, managing and delivering this content, from text to video to podcasts and more, has become increasingly challenging for brands. To help brands provide an enhanced customer experience, Sitecore has developed a comprehensive ecosystem of SaaS-based tools and services and a composable architecture to lower the dual challenges of servicing their traditional “dotcom” web presence and enabling them to deliver on-brand content across all digital channels and marketing touchpoints.

Enabling digitally savvy brands to innovate faster

In today’s world digital experience is the battlefield for brands – they need the agility to quickly launch new digital experiences to differentiate and compete. Many have developers on-hand to support business stakeholders in launching specialized campaign specific websites and functionally rich omnichannel experiences (think metaverse, voice, kiosk, IoT) that support evolving go-to-market strategies. To help these brands, Sitecore developed Content Hub One, an agile Headless CMS which is purpose-built for collaboration between marketers and developers to deliver differentiated digital experiences with ease.

Helping people find what they need, fast

As consumers look for new ways to quickly find information that’s catered to them, the power of search and discovery has never been more important. Facing a digital search transformation, especially with users evolving away from text to video and other rich media, marketers need an intelligent search capability. Sitecore Search was built for this transformative moment, offering marketers an intuitive system that serves hyper-relevant content through AI-powered search. It’s available to add on top of any website to power the search box with lightning-fast presentation of search results, surfacing content recommendations selected by AI or curated by marketers to drive engagement and conversion.

Taming MarTech ecosystem complexity

Today there are over 7,000 marketing technologies to choose from. Every brand faces the challenge of assembling a tech stack that meets the unique needs of their business model, market and customer base. To help Sitecore customers with this challenge we’ve launched Sitecore Connect – a low- /no-code solution, with a simple drag and drop UI, that allows brands to seamlessly connect Sitecore products to their unique ecosystem via thousands of out-of-the-box connectors and automation recipes.

To help brands of all sizes maximize their Martech investment, Sitecore offers a portfolio of tools and services to ensure the long-term success of their digital strategy. Its customer success program, Sitecore 360, spans the entire software implementation lifecycle, from tech training and adoption to professional services and customer support.

All these solutions complement XM Cloud, the modern, cloud-native enterprise CMS at the linchpin of the Sitecore ecosystem. We believe the content experience is the customer experience and brands need their experiences to be fast, relevant, and global. XM Cloud provides all the benefits of a leading digital experience platform that meets these needs without the overhead or hassle of maintaining supporting hardware infrastructure. This enables brands to quickly implement new customer experiences through simplified design and deployment. The cloud-native platform also ensures that marketing teams have the latest technology at their fingertips every time they log on – with new innovations being added all the time.

Over the past year, we’ve doubled down on delivering innovative, next-generation tools to support the entire content lifecycle – from strategy to delivery. It’s been rewarding to see how the industry has risen to the challenges of the rapid shift to digital and met the accelerated pace of customer expectations. It’s clear this shift will have a lasting impact on brands’ approaches to developing and delivering positive and engaging customer experiences, and Sitecore is committed to helping them accomplish their goals.  

To learn more about Sitecore’s content discovery and management tools, visit us here.

Digital Transformation

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For pharmaceutical companies in the digital era, intense pressure to achieve medical miracles falls as much on the shoulders of CIOs as on lead scientists.

Rigid requirements to ensure the accuracy of data and veracity of scientific formulas as well as machine learning algorithms and data tools are common in modern laboratories.

When Bob McCowan was promoted to CIO at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in 2018, he had previously run the data center infrastructure for the $81.5 billion company’s scientific, commercial, and manufacturing businesses since joining the company in 2014.

In that capacity, he knew that, in addition to having the right team and technical building blocks in place, data was the key to Regeneron’s future success.

“It is all about the data. Everything we do is data-driven, and at that time, we were very datacenter-driven but the technology had lots of limitations” says McCowan. “It worked for us to keep the company successful, but it wasn’t giving us the scale and horsepower needed.”

To achieve what the company would need going forward, McCowan knew Regeneron would have to undergo a major transformation and build a more enhanced data pipeline that could inject data from up to 1,000 data sources in “analytical ready formats” for both the business and the scientists to consume, the CIO says.

And to do this, a move to the cloud was essential. “The only way to enable our scientists and scale up and grow in the future is to really embrace the cloud, and not just in terms of computational power and storage, but being able to deploy into different environments, different countries,” McCowan says. “If you are not on the cloud, you are going to be left behind.”

Empowering scientists through the cloud

McCowan set about migrating Regeneron to Amazon Web Services in late 2018. By 2020, IT had moved roughly 60% of all company data to the cloud — no minor task for an international firm that generated $16 billion in revenue in 2021, employs more than 10,000 people, and holds nine FDA- and EMA-approved drugs with an additional 30 in clinical trials.

The company’s multicloud infrastructure has since expanded to include Microsoft Azure for business applications and Google Cloud Platform to provide its scientists with a greater array of options for experimentation.

“Google created some very interesting algorithms and tools that are available in AWS,” McCowan says. “And some things [Regeneron’s scientists] can only try out in the Google cloud. So, we are using all three mainstream clouds, but really the core of it is around AWS.”

Due to the complexity of the Regeneron’s experimentation and testing, the company uses a variety of standard SaaS tools for analysis but its enhanced cloud-based MetaBio Data Discovery Platform, which provides a wide array of data services, data management tools, and machine learning tools as “icing on the cake,” is the crown jewel of the company’s analytics operations, McCowan says.

MetaBio, which received a 2022 CIO 100 Award, provides a single source for datasets in a unified format, enabling researchers to quickly extract information about various therapeutic functions without having to worry about how to prepare or find the data.

“Scientists come to us with white papers which may be identifying theoretical ways that you could analyze a scientific experiment,” McCowan says. “We’ll work with those scientists and actually build the computer models and go run it, and it can be anything from sub-visual particle imaging to protein folding,” he says. “In other cases, it’s more of a standard computational requirement and we help them provide the data in the right formats. Then the data is consumed by SaaS-based computational tools, but it still sits within our organization and sits within the controls of our cloud-based solutions.”

Much of Regeneron’s data, of course, is confidential. For that reason, many of its data tools — and even its data lake — were built in-house using AWS.

“We have our own data lakehouses in AWS,” says McCowan, who also lead Regeneron IT to a 2020 CIO 100 Award, for developing Regeneron Deva Platform, a research computing platform built to simplify, scale, and accelerate the early discovery analytical experience. “By creating some small adjustments, we are allowing scientists to connect data in ways they were not able to before. Our vision for the data lake is that we want to be able to connect every group, from our genetic center through manufacturing through clinical safety and early research. That’s hard to do when you have 30 years of data.”

The data platform provides constant access to connected and contextualized data via data lakes, scalable clouds, data processing and AI services, the CIO says, adding that the company’s data lakes manage roughly 200 terabytes of data.

Fueling innovation with data

McCowan is cautious not to restrict the use of external tools — particularly cloud-native tools — that help scientists dig for discoveries. At the infrastructure level, Regeneron scientists use AWS EMR and Cloudera. At the data pipeline level, scientists use Apigee, Airflow, NiFi, and Kafka. At the data warehouse level, scientists use Redshift. As you go up the stack, different data analytics come into play, such as DataIQ. From a language perspective, scientists use Python and Jupyter Notebooks.

For McCowan, the key is to give scientists any and all tools that allow them to explore their hypotheses and test theories. “One of the fantastic things about Regeneron is that we’re driven by curiosity,” the CIO says. “We’re driven by science, and by innovation, and we try to avoid putting hard boundaries around what we do because it tends to stifle innovation.”

Despite the fact that Regeneron scientists have AI and ML tools at their disposal, data remains the key, McCowan says, and it’s the power of the cloud and analytics alone that may reveal the next biggest breakthrough from data that is 10 years old.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read about these fantastic projects using AI and ML, but you never see the output because they fail,” McCowan says. “And the reason they are failing is that people are not putting enough thought into where the data is coming from. That is why we built our data infrastructure. So, by the time that data lands in the data lakes, and we start applying AI and ML, we know we are using it against high-quality data.”

As the company’s chief technologist, McCowan’s job is to digitize everything and help scientists make the best use of the data and metadata regardless of how it is generated.

“It always comes back to the data and the insights that we can provide using different technologies and increasing the speed of decision-making,” McCowan says, adding that providing scientists with the ability to run experimentation mathematically through engines using AI and ML models speeds up discovery, but it will never replace the wet lab.

The combination of enhanced IT and science is what will drive maximum innovation at Regeneron, McCowan says. And here, the MetaBio data platform will play a key role in facilitating breakthrough discoveries far faster than previously possible.

“The level of detail there with us digitizing everything, we’re able to apply technology and tools to help scientists make connections that they were just not able to make before,” McCowan says. “If you look at it from a pure data perspective, what we can do is find ways to [enable scientists] to connect the data better and faster and make those insights and bring drugs to market down to a five-year or four-year [process], when before it was a 10-year process.”

Analytics, CIO 100, Cloud Computing, Healthcare Industry, Machine Learning