What events in UCB’s strategic context required De Prins to revisit the digital strategy?

A wave of change across economic and demographic factors set the stage for a digital
movement in healthcare. The biggest players in technology were moving into healthcare,
prompting a paradigm shift amongst consumers. Dependency on doctors reduced as
consumers were empowered with the ability to find answers to a plethora of medical questions
from the comfort of their devices. This shift in behavior meant that healthcare must adapt and
become more digital to generate true value for consumers and patients.
In addition to user convenience, the digitalization of healthcare produced vast amounts of new
data that encouraged healthcare providers to move beyond drugs and address patient care
more holistically. This understanding was ingrained in the CEO’s decision to shift to a patient-
value model for UCB’s strategy. Growing competition in the industry meant that patient-relevant
data grew deeper and more abundant. To maintain a patient-centric model of operation, UCB
needed to leverage the wealth of data to develop a granular and precise understanding of each
customer. There was no longer an average patient – unique data was now accessible, and an
inability to grasp its potential would be crippling.
Become a patient-preferred leader could not be don in isolations, and the digital strategy
required seeking external input and data for optimization. UCB needed an efficient way to mix
and match both internal and external data to generate the desired results.

What were the achievements and shortcomings highlighted during UCB’s executive
meeting?
Many actions taken within the company, including Lieutenant’s sprints, had not only shown
UCB’s ability to make the digital transformation, but boasted the innovation and cohesion of the
entire organization. The team had generated immense learning and had started to piece
together an image of the future of IT, paving the way for how teams should think.
While immense progress was made on this front, a gap remained between overall culture.
Although people had seen the value of Lieutenant’s work, the data-oriented mindset that drove
those results were not internalized across the company, much less the industry. People were
still not willing to take the necessary risks, and despite erecting a minimum viable structure for
progress, the entire company was needed to actualize the transformation.

What were the proposals & decisions De Prins should put forward at the executive
meeting?
De Prins must propose a structure that encourages analytics driven mindset for every member
of the UCB community. Internalization of the promising work done by Lieutenant, and analytics
progress thereafter is a necessary step to achieve goals at the scale needed. Teams must
understand how to leverage these learnings and implement them at both a micro and macro
scale. Each entity that is driven with the right analytics mindset will propel the next stage of
growth at an exponential rate.
The balance that must be struck however is decision-making around team structure. De Prins
must propose a structure that ensures data doesn’t once again become siloed among teams
who feel compelled to hire their own data scientists. UCB must encourage a data-driven
process at every stage, without creating several smaller, segregated data organizations within
the larger company.