Join the LiveCall

Please call Line 1 at (916) 469-4750. PIN: 541628.
Wednesday, August 17th
10:30-11:00am PDT

Monica Kumar, Genentech

The presenter(s) will not be making the same presentation as at the IT Summit, but instead will present a brief overview and then engage with the participants. The abstract below is provided to give you a sense of their interest:

Genentech has an academic and strong employee culture focused on fostering innovation and collaboration. We believe that applying Genentech’s risk-based business approach, IT will offer better services at lower cost and higher innovation and in 2007 following through on that vision, we adopted Google Apps as our collaboration suite for the enterprise. Since being acquired by Roche in 2009, the focus turned to interoperability and to make the collaborative 4A (Anytime, Anywhere, with Anyone, using Any device) vision a reality for the global organization.

The goal was to build solutions that would work across systems without causing disruption to existing services while still maintaining high customer satisfaction and a user-friendly experience. The biggest challenge was calendar interoperability and in a large organization like ours, its probably the most painful of all because a lot of people across Roche and Genentech rely heavily on their respective calendaring system. We realized that innovation demands interoperability. This talk is about how we adopted open standards, collaborated with third parties, followed a release early and often approach to building cloud-based solutions and always relied heavily on getting customer feedback so that we could adapt and work on what was most important to the business. This presentation will also highlight the challenges we faced along the way, the lessons we learned and the organizational change management that it took to make this happen and last but not least, the unexpected benefits we are reaping from this approach and some of the next steps we are working on.