Regeneron’s CIO on Pursuing Cloud and AI Innovation While Managing the IT Basics

Technology can be a powerful force for change. But the challenge for businesses can be finding the right technology to drive that transformation.

For Regeneron, it was the shift to the cloud. Now, armed with a more capable foundation, the biotech giant is quickly finding new ways for technology to improve operations – all while maintaining strict regulatory control over the underlying data assets. Now, that mentality is helping to fuel a broader transformation within Regeneron, one where more employees increasingly have unfettered access to data and AI to do their jobs better.

“We focused around building out essentially a whole new set of infrastructure and services around this idea of everything in the cloud. And by doing that, it allowed us … to go really fast,” Chief Information Officer Bob McCowan told the “CIO Leadership Live” podcast. “What that created was an environment where people were hungry to explore new ideas, new ways of working.”

To ensure IT investments and outcomes are aligned, Bob and team start with the business problem and then figure out the right technology to solve it. Regeneron also maintains a central IT group that’s responsible for day-to-day upkeep, as well as teams embedded within the research and clinical operations that “support them and also try and drive how they can do things better,” according to Bob.

“Doing it for the sake of technology makes no sense. The driver has got to be what's the business process,” he said.