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By Michael Eggebrecht
For Daphne Jones, a long-time Johnson & Johnson executive who is now SVP and CIO of Hospira, healthcare is a natural industry in which to exercise her IT leadership skills.
“I have been devoted to healthcare since the death of my parents due to lack of good healthcare,” explains Jones. “My team and I delight in the fact that we at Hospira make things that help patients feel better and live longer.”
On Nov. 9, Jones put in her first day of work at Hospira, a provider of generic injectable drugs and medication delivery devices, which reported $1 billion in sales in the third quarter. At Lake Forest, Ill.-based Hospira, Jones has had to hit the ground running on, among other projects, an enterprise-wide SAP implementation.
But Jones, 52, is no stranger to large-scale IT initiatives. At Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), which she joined in 1997, Jones was most recently VP of IT for the company and CIO of its Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics subsidiary. In that position she led JNJ’s recent sector-wide IT transformation. And in various director and executive director roles in different JNJ businesses over the years, she has driven implementation of regional SAP solutions in Japan, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the U.S.
Jones, who has also been director of IT at Public Service Electric & Gas in Newark, N.J. and spent 14 years at IBM, recently exchanged e-mails with CIOZone about what it’s like to be an IT manager at a company the size of Johnson & Johnson, and how she views her role at Hospira.
You spent more than a decade at Johnson & Johnson, and spearheaded a number of cross-company IT initiatives there. What lessons did you learn from these big projects?
Success for large-scale projects is really about the basics, it's nothing fancy. I've found there are four keys to success:
1) Make sure there is a business transformation need that the project will address. The “burning platform” needs to be evident or called out. As an IT leader, there are times when I have people showing the IT milestones, and not the business process transformation milestones. They are both important, but business process must lead. The IT system will do whatever you want it to do. Let's spend the money to make the business outcomes transformative.
2) There must be measurable business outcomes that everyone agrees to. Will we reduce recalls? Will we create customer loyalty? Will we increase revenue/cut costs? Improve cycle time? What will be different and better when we are done? How will we know that we've arrived? Outcomes in business terms measured against a baseline is key to driving success.
3) There must be a governance team for the large-scale programs that will ensure team member accountabilities, ensure resources are provided, ensure a locked down scope, and take note of early warning signs that may require the steering team to act.
4) The project must have a sponsor and should be outlined in peoples’ goals so all have the incentive to drive success. And they must be measured not only on scope/budget/time, but also how they exhibit transformational behaviors that will drive change.
What’s the biggest challenge for an IT leader at a corporation as large and diversified as Johnson & Johnson?
When I was at Johnson & Johnson, the biggest challenge I faced was how to best operate IT under the enterprise’s decentralized model. It drove the continual question: what IT solutions and organizations should be standard, global and consistent versus what IT solutions and organizations should be custom and differentiated to help drive entrepreneurial marketplace success?
Can you describe the model?
At JNJ, there are hundreds of operating companies -- each with their own general manager, president or company group chairman, depending on the size of the company. Under a single company group chairman, you might even have several operating companies. A CIO is accountable for driving technical solutions for their GM, president or company group chair.
In addition to aligning to those top leaders, we also had three sectors to which the companies belonged (device/diagnostics, consumer and pharma). Finally, we had corporate HQ to which we all reported, but which had an arm’s length relationship at times to the companies. Every company is a part of a sector, and all sectors report to corporate.
All the companies have their own brand and face to the market, so the challenge was how to strike the right balance between standard IT solutions that take advantage of leveraging of resources and enables corporate to plan and make decisions versus providing custom and unique IT solutions that will enable the individual operating company to compete and win based on product/brand differentiation.
If we focused on driving everything to standard, it could have hampered or killed our decentralization -- the foundation upon which JNJ rests. But if all systems are different, JNJ wouldn’t be taking advantage of its scale and leveraging resources in an efficient way. It’s a tough but important balance to strike. As in the case at JNJ, when you have so many IT VPs, it became important to act as one IT to move in concert and make the standard versus custom decisions as one organization, even though the IT organization was very distributed around the world.
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