AstraZeneca offers a prescription for mobile UX challenges

A biopharmaceutical giant like AstraZeneca can only create a drug that treats illnesses by getting really good at diagnosing the details of a problem. David Del Giudice approaches user experience at the firm in much the same way.

Speaking at the Mobile Enterprise Strategies Summit in Toronto this week, Del Giudice, chief architect of enterprise IS at AstraZeneca, said the concept of UX design has been part of a major mind shift at his company, and his industry as a whole. Whereas biopharmaceutical firms have traditionally developed almost everything in-house, there is a movement to work more collaboratively with a wide range of stakeholders, including hospitals, suppliers and even patients. Wherever possible, AstraZeneca is also partnering with entities that can provide a competitive advantage, like a startup that may have a useful product but could benefit from AstraZeneca’s distributions capabilities.

All this means that when AstraZeneca tries to take a user-centric approach to designing technology, there are a lot of users to think about. And they can’t all have their own special technology tools.

“When we would do a design session where we would ask, ‘What do you want your app to look like?’ that kept moving us to what we wanted to get away from, which is a monolithic design approach,” he said. “Instead, we’re focused on the concept of reusable enterprise domain capabilities.”

Here’s an example of what Del Giudice means: One of the common processes at AstraZeneca is approvals. There are approvals that need to be done in HR, finance and so on. Many of these approval processes can be done electronically, but not always easily. “We would get complaints from executives about logging into six different systems to do approvals and not being sure if they were connected,” he said.

To deal with that, Del Giudice and his team created an approvals portal with a common login, which would tie back to the various systems of record that would store approvals once they happen. “This way the workflows continue so we don’t have these roadblocks or pinchpoints.”

The UX lesson here, he said, was to look for what core enterprise capabilities technology can offer, and then figuring out how they need to be differentiated for various lines of business. “What’s unique — do they each need their own mobility and integration teams and create centres of excellence?” In many cases probably not.

The hybrid choice

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the largest lines of business at AstraZeneca is sales and marketing. Del Giudice and his team are currently spending more time talking with employees in that department to better understand their day-to-day activities and where mobile technologies can help. From a technical perspective, the company has chosen to focus on “hybrid” apps based on open standards like HTML5 rather than Objective C or a specific vendor’s software development kit. For Del Giudice, the benefits are obvious.

“It’s about choices, not about finding the golden egg or the golden nugget,” he said. “You’re getting the ability to provide the organization a quick turnaround leveraging a code base you’ve already delivered and in a container that allows you access the underlying architecture.”

In the longer term, Del Giudice sees the potential of mobile UX expanding far outside his own company’s walls. He said he’s thinking about how apps could tap into sensor networks that are being embedded in everyday environments, a trend sometimes referred to as the “Internet of Things.” AstraZeneca could provide value here by offering mobile tools that could help patients manage their medication intake, for instance. He said taking a user-centric approach internally will position the company to be more successful with what gets designed for the outside world.

“UX starts to bring a stronger focus on people than just a process and system approach,” he said. “What we often found was, when you just take a process or a system approach, you’ll get to a great solution that fits well for finance or HR, but if those systems can’t connect with each other, you have a challenge.”