NOVEMBER 2022LIFE SCIENCES REVIEW8IN MY OPINIONam an information systems professional of 30 years, having worked in several industries including technology, education, non-profit, government, news media, and consulting. I currently serve as CIO for United Therapeutics (UT), a biotechnology company that is focused on the development of therapies for patients suffering from Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH), a life-threatening disease. Currently there is no cure for PAH, but UT has developed several drug therapies that treat the disease.I joined UT in 2000, and have helped grow the company to over $1.4 billion in annual revenue and more than 700 employees. This has been an exciting journey, both as it relates to the success of the company and the evolution of technology.Over the past 10 years, my focus has been on "keeping the lights on" through business process improvement: implementing ERP for finance and supply chain management, deploying solutions meeting good manufacturing practices to run UT's manufacturing and regulatory processes, user training, distributed computing via virtualization, thin-mapping, business continuity planning, collaboration solutions, and rapid Cloud adoption. This is not to mention, fully leveraging the capabilities of the Internet.My role as CIO has evolved from Information Technology (IT) "beeps and clicks" to "Connecting, Informing, and Orchestrating":Connecting: There are two aspects to Connecting:The first aspect of Connecting refers to physically implementing the conduit through which the organization communicates and computes; that is, infrastructure (connectivity, systems, availability and security).The second aspect of Connecting refers to consulting: I partner with business unit leaders to help provide solutions that address business issues, thus enabling growth. Recently, my team collaborated with Human Resources to build a "social" Intranet. Our priorities for this new Intranet were to improve overall communication for a growing organization, but also to keep the company on track with best practices in building a unifying and collaborative community for our over 700 globally distributed staff. In this process, we also moved the Intranet to a more efficient and flexible Cloud environment.Informing: At UT, business leaders are empowered to source and procure their own system solutions, particularly from the Cloud. It is very clear that leaders know their business better than any IT department could. The expectation that IT can be the By Shola Oyewole, CIO, United Therapeutics Corporation [NASDAQ:UTHR]ADVANCED THERAPIES FOR PATIENTS SUFFERING FROM PAHIShola Oyewole
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