When business leaders think about digital transformation, what comes to mind is improving customer service, increasing company agility, or increasing access to data-driven insights. In the digital age, it is of course imperative to innovate in ways that enable your organization to deliver exceptional customer experiences. But it’s equally significant to rethink the experiences you provide your employees. Reinventing your talent strategy will enable you to attract, develop and retain your most valuable asset: people whose creativity and adaptability will drive your business forward into the future.
At Think 2021, Jim Swanson, CIO at Johnson & Johnson, described exactly how the healthcare and pharmaceutical leader does this. Jim’s team at Johnson & Johnson Technology uses AI-powered skills inference to create a future-ready workforce.
Educating the workforce of the future
The healthcare and pharmaceutical industries are subject to constant disruption. However, Johnson & Johnson has continued to play a pioneering role in this field for over a century. One way the company has achieved this goal is by prioritizing the needs and well-being of patients, healthcare providers and employees. Investing in improving the quality of employee experience is the main assumption of the strategy.
“Only 41% of companies say they currently have access to the talent and skills they need to achieve their business goals,” explains Amy Wright, managing partner and talent transformation leader at IBM, based on research from the IBM Institute for Business Value . “To overcome this gap, there is a strong need to shape the future workforce.”
Johnson & Johnson supports its employees by teaching them how to best operate advanced and emerging technologies. “One of the things the pandemic has taught us is the critical importance of adaptability,” explains Jim. “If we don’t have the right talent, we won’t be able to address the uncertainties of the future at scale.”
The role of technology: Creating an “i” strategy.
Breaking up-to-date ground through continuous technological innovation is crucial for any healthcare company that wants to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace. At Johnson & Johnson, it is also central to the company’s mission. Johnson & Johnson credo provides the organization with a moral compass and a recipe for business success.
“We always strive to align our activities with our mission, which is to change the trajectory of human health,” says Jim. “When we think about technology, we don’t use the word “or.” It’s not ethics or technology, science or technology. It’s always “and”. Whether we’re creating a vaccine, life-saving drugs like the CAR-T cancer treatment, or innovations like digital surgery, technology plays a role. By educating our employees, we boost the technical competences of the entire company. In this way, we deliver results that provide extraordinary value to the patients we serve.”
At J&J, science is at the core of our mission,” says Jim. “Also at the heart of our mission is improving health care, ensuring we live up to our ethics and improve people’s lives while reaching underserved communities around the world. None of these things can be achieved without technology. Maximizing the value of technology plays a key role in everything we do.”
Through Johnson & Johnson’s digital transformation, IT continued to focus on three core aspects of its technology strategy: accelerating business results, modernizing the technology ecosystem and preparing talent for the future. “The framework of this strategy always works, even as the content evolves over time,” Jim explains.
Using data and artificial intelligence to transform J&J’s workforce
In today’s world, the half-life of learned skills is constantly decreasing. What was once estimated to be 10-15 years is now only 5 years, and much less for technical professionals. World Economic Forum report on the future of jobs. This means that vigorous and continuous technology learning is crucial to business success. “We needed to be able to take a more methodical look at the skills of our employees,” explains Jim.
“Working with IBM, we created an AI-powered skills inference model for the technology function that combined de-identified external data with skills data from our internal datasets. We were able to collect employee skills data from the tools my IT organization uses and feed it into the model. The AI was then able to determine each person’s maturity level for each skill we wanted to highlight,” says Jim.
Johnson & Johnson then compared the model’s findings with the employee’s self-assessment and the manager’s assessment. These assessments gave them three ways to look at each employee’s data, giving them a comprehensive picture of individual strengths and weaknesses. This allows them to establish an initial baseline for each person within the company’s future skill set. On this basis, they build learning and experience plans.
IBM also relies on similar technology. “We also use skill inference,” says Amy. “One of the things this has achieved is a significant increase in the speed at which we can assess people’s skills. This allows us to quickly see where we are – and where we are not – ready for the future.”
Collaborating with IBM has enabled Johnson & Johnson’s technology team to build an clever skills inference engine that enhances skill building and knowledge transfer across the company. It’s one more way today’s leading innovators are coming together to shape the future of work.
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