Presentation by Steve Woodward in my team at Enterprise Search Summit 2015 in London on 20th October. Examples of how we have leveraged a cloud-based enterprise search platform to help drive our mobile and user experience competencies across a global organisation. Examples include an enterprise mobile app for simplifying approvals, search-based microapplications and in-video transcription.

1. Extending Enterprise Search at AstraZeneca
Steven Woodward
20th October 2015 | Enterprise Search Europe 20th October 2015
“Developing the Search Competency Centre to catalyse
innovation in a global organisation”

2. CTO – Enterprise Technology Thinking
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Developments in healthcare and technology are driving an ever-increasing
pace of change. Advances in areas as diverse as mobility, internet of things,
data & analytics, cloud computing and user experience are coming together
in new and unpredictable ways, raising expectations on IT to innovate &
deliver value to AstraZeneca
AZIT has established a new CTO Office to leverage emerging technologies to
improve productivity and enhance our IT investments, whilst being aware of
disruptive, game-changing opportunities in our industry.
Enterprise Architecture Leadership - Governing Technology Across AstraZeneca
Competency Centres – Build and Uplift New Capabilities within AstraZeneca
Technology Incubation Labs – Access, Accelerate & Adopt Emerging Technologies
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3. Technology Incubation Labs
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San Francisco is today’s Innovation Capital of
the World and our tech lab will facilitate links
with innovative research start-ups, venture
capitalists and global technology leaders. This
office provides new opportunities at the
forefront of healthcare digital innovation and
major breakthroughs in enterprise technology.
Today we have 3 tech labs in San Francisco,
Cambridge and Shanghai. Presence in these key
technology clusters gives an early view of
emerging technologies, companies and start-ups
Cambridge is the most dynamic scientific
business cluster in the world. We are
surrounded by 19 science parks with over
1,500 high-tech companies, world class
academic institutions at the bleeding
edge of scientific research and key
research hospitals like Addenbrookes.
Shanghai is emerging as the top city for
tech innovation internationally and is
predicted to become the global technology
centre within 4 years. Our tech lab is able
to tap into novel scientific research &
development, advanced engineering,
health nanotechnology and robotics.

4. The new CTO Office established this year and has made significant progress in uplifting technology
innovation. Our technology incubation process has three phases:
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CTO Office: Catalysing New IT Skills & Innovation
 Prototype the most innovative and
enabling technological capabilities for
our business, using our global
technology scouting and our
knowledge of external trends
 Hackathons,
 5 day free, out of the box
 Pilot these new approaches by
working on immediate problems
within our Technology Labs and
evaluate in a real business context
 Business problem driven
 90 days, paid time & materials
 Fail fast, but for those that are
successful, bring swiftly into the
company and adopt the platform for
other business areas and problems
 Continuous agile development with
business Product Owner.

5. Competency Centres
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Even though only established this year, significant progress made in uplifting technology innovation by
creating competency centres that will upskill staff within AstraZeneca on the most critical capabilities
for our business based on technology scouting and external trends.
These centres are initially incubated in our tech labs whilst the best and brightest are hired into
AstraZeneca and we work on immediate business problems to demonstrate real value, but drive
standards through experience, best practise and collaboration of likeminded individuals.
When ready, centres graduate and ownership transitions appropriately. By staggering our efforts, the
CTO office can continually drive new competencies each year.
SearchMobilityUser Experience
Developed competency and Sinequa
now used globally across AZ. In Q3,
Search Factory established in Shared
Services
Established centre to rationalise
existing estate and develop new
enterprise apps, set direction &
champion mobile 1st excellence
Practical UX with key AZ projects
whilst hired major talent. Improving
usability in software, drugs and
devices.

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Competency Centre: Search
Search-based applications – developed custom applications for specific business
problems – scientific search, competitive intelligence, medical affairs…

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Competency Centre: Search
Enterprise Search – developed in 8 weeks with Sinequa & Pebble. Launched to 60k
users in multiple language, indexing internal and cloud based documents.

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Search: Incubating UX Competency Centre
“it finally feels that
you are being
listened to”
UX Lab piloted with
Enterprise Search using
Sigma
40 quick fixes applied
within 5 days
1 major functionality
and design change
implemented in 1 month
Already seen increase in
feedback & usability

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Search: Incubating UX Competency Centre
New colour scheme – more intuitive Filters and People recommendations based
upon extracted entities – Inline social integration and feed back

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Search: Increased Functionality via Micro Applications
When you search google, it ‘knows’ what you want to do.
We have been experimenting
with creating similar search
cards, for common actions that
users do…
• Book Holiday
• Submit IT Ticket
• Check free desk location
• Password reset

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Video Transcription with Advanced Cloud Analytics
• Automatic transcription of
videos via asynchronous API
calls
• Sentence level entity
extraction of terms allows
extraction of key elements
previously un- searchable
• Inline video playback, starting
right where you want it to
• From concept to 60k users in
6 weeks!
Currently scouting new technologies in Sentiment Analysis, Reasoning Engines and personal
information removal - please reach out!

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Search On The Move – Find People App
 Find people based on all their information such as name,
location, job title, biography and skills.
 Call or email the person you’ve found at the click of the
mouse or a touch of the screen.
 See where a person fits in AstraZeneca’s organisation, who
their manager is and if they have any direct reports.
 Geo-location aware to make it easier to meet colleagues by
sharing your current location on the map

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• Mobile enterprise app for approving travel, expenses and procurement requests from 10 systems!
• Futureproof – designed to easily integrate other ‘approvals’ with APIs
• Single mobile app for senior executives who lead busy lives to filter by most urgent ‘to do’
Search On The Move – Approvals App
Using Sinequa as a Mobile Back-end as a Service
(MBaaS) to unify and query data on any mobile device.

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Search: It’s all about being one team
Eddie Wu Isobelle
Derrig
Sunny
Advani
To be successful, we find it’s critical that our partners feel part of our team every day.
Youssef
Belghali
Steve
Sale
Mark
Woolley
Adrian
Barrass
Anilkumar
Manchikatla
Ming
Chen
To work with us or hear more, reach out to cto@astrazeneca.com