New Pharma CIO

Any comments on the new CIO?

 

ruth thorpe?

 

How many CIOs does Novartis have ? Seems like everyone running an area is a CIO.

 

Yes Ruth Thorpe

 

I will be showing Rob James and Scott Owen Mason around for a couple of hours tomorrow. Are they good guys?

 

Rob James is a survivor - nothing more. He was just quietly waiting for his chance at the CIO role and the big bucks that come with it; he's arrogant as hell, with a huge sense of entitlement - in other words, a typical pharma exec, grossly overpaid for doing not much more than keeping his job secure

 

Rob James is a good CIO; he was even elevated to CIO of the YEAR by Oracle for the great job he has done at Novartis.

 

you do work for him, no? He became Oracle CIO of the yer because he did wast lots of millions on Oracle. He financed Oracles life science solution by himself and then had to remove his whole team because the project was sooo sucessfull. Not enough, he hd to buy 100 million of licenses he cannot deploy. Oracle only then had to reward him for such greatness.
As long as he is buddy of Joe Jim and wastes less gazillions then the OTC lady appointed by Joe, he will be protected.

 

You are close: The losses from Joe's OTC appointment mount to over 1 billion, from his appointment of James probably 100 million waste with the Oracle deals alone.

But James is not done yet, 700 million budget to put Alcon on SAP (crazy on one hand as previous internal studies showed half that amount for the whole group and worrisome how the previously cost conscious Alcon agreed to that, they do not know what will hit them and their margins), continuous security breaches and outages all over the place.
And let us outsource IT to Prague (the worldcenter of low cost IT). It is certainly 10% cheaper than Basel, but so is Lörrach... 5 km away.

 

There are plenty of these examples: An acquisition spent 2 million to implement a full SAP for themselves - Novartis then spent 12 million to inteegrate them into their SANDOZ system... Sense? None whatsoever.
Waste, waste, waste... that is the way it works in a company where importance is defined by how much you spent.

Btw, have you ever heard of a single SAP system with different charts of accounts for each country...it takes special effort to achieve that. Where do you think you can witness such a wonder?

With the Alcon SAP project and its 1 billion price tag, James will clearly again be SAP or Accenture CIO of the Year before the project starts...

 

You probably mean Deloitte CIO of the YEAR...

 

Re: New Pharma CIO - Funny business

So what cars are James, Welter and co driving?

 

Re: New Pharma CIO - Funny business

Porsches and BMWs...

 

Medals for Rob

No it won't. Isn't that brilliant? Continually getting his way and higher and higher budgets... Results are certainly what someone can turn them( or nothing) into. It is all in a powerpoint.
Oracle is right. Someone give Rob a medal!!!

Let us start a Twitter campaign: Medals for Rob!!!

 

Norton is now fixing up Philips like it should have been done at Novartis. Nothing has happened there other than
1. Diamond project to fix infra failed and ended
2. Atlas project to retry again once more shut down without results
3. SOX IT remediation is still going on - how ridiculous is that? A company spending billions on IT are still (after 10 years not able to comply) not SOX compliant and needing to hire external PMs to keep trying (google Matthias Hall on LinkedIn).

No wonder that they cannot control the quality of their vaccines at Novartis... if they cannot even get SOX right, what hope is there?

 

What the hell are the auditors and the FDA doing about this? Just dig out the IBM report on the recent Novartis SAP outages and in the finding are very clear that half of the IT department has had unidentified ROOT access to all the SAP servers for the past years. That should have been a full SOX flag and was also a huge infringement of FDA validated system rules.

Neither the Novartis external auditors nor the FDA is doing their job. WHY is the big question?

 

Imagine the total forecast is now 1.5 billion - 900 for Alcon, 400 for Pharma and the rest OTC / Sandoz. Clearly James got the money they saved on Vasella and can threw it at his consulting buddies... Isn't that ridiculous and what do they get for it? NOOTHINGGGG!!!! but a continuing mess.

 

Isn't that as useless as an ashtray on a motorbike CIO of the stationary cupboard Stephanie Troester meant to be dealing with all that IGM Sox stuff?

 

Clearly the Oracle consume all you want deal did not get renewed which shows that it was a bad deal. Is anybody doing the accounting to see what was actually deployed from what was planned and document how terribly bad this deal was???? Probably not - Does Harri Kirsch have a clue of the shit happening under him? Maybe Rob will get Harri fired too.

 

Re: New Pharma CIO - Funny business

Rob is now driving Ferrari? it seems Oracle support was worth it.