Gilead Sciences Realizes the Business Value of an ICoE

To deliver effective therapeutics that enhance patient care as quickly as possible, Gilead Sciences has invested significantly in technology over the last 15 to 20 years. As a business that depends on data, it was critical for Gilead to connect its more than 145 data sources to establish a single version of the truth for its customers — employees, patients, and hospitals — to use in therapeutics decision-making.

The 30-year-old biopharmaceutical research company worked with Boomi to implement a modern, cloud-native enterprise integration platform that connects more than 145 on-premises and cloud systems, including Salesforce, Oracle eBusiness Suite, and Oracle Database. This helps empower Gilead Sciences to deliver data-driven therapeutics to the world.

Boomi enables Gilead Sciences' IT team to execute its three pillars — providing core services, supporting people with technology, and driving innovation, as outlined in our Gilead success story. And Boomi supplies the technology foundation to enable the business to continue to work tirelessly to deliver medicines for life-threatening diseases, like hepatitis C.

"Boomi provides the brain for connecting our ecosystem internally and externally, giving our customers access to a shared, single source of truth so they can deliver their functions effectively," says Murali Anakavur, IT director at Gilead Sciences.

Learn more about how Gilead Sciences is leveraging its ICoE to speed development and deliver innovation in our case study.

Creating an Integration Center of Excellence (ICoE)

Gilead IT leveraged Boomi Integration, Boomi API Management, Boomi B2B/EDI Management and Boomi Integration Center of Excellence (ICoE) services to integrate its systems and centralize standards and technology usage.

An ICoE is a team of experts dedicated to implementing and guiding integration best practices across an organization. By supporting more integration builders across both IT and the business, ICoEs help enterprises create better integrations, faster.

For Gilead Sciences, the Boomi ICoE model supports the need for operational agility and speed by building a community of enablement. The model provides Gilead’s business units and development teams greater autonomy to accelerate integration projects while ensuring quality and consistency across the entire organization.

Before the ICoE was established, Gilead’s hybrid IT environment was complex. The legacy services-oriented architecture (SOA) it used to connect internal and external systems for things like labs, drug manufacturing, and product lifecycle management didn’t provide flexible connectivity.

With disparate data sources serving IT’s customers, the ICoE enables Gilead Sciences to manage integration requirements across business units, allowing the company to accelerate time to market for new products and services, reduce its technical debt, and realize:

• Reuse and scalability: The ICoE roadmap establishes a list of reusable frameworks to be built over time, shortening time to delivery.
• Operational efficiency and productivity: Standard platforms and operating models allow the business and IT to foster collaboration and sharing.
• Compliance and risk management: Consistent oversight and repeatable processes facilitate compliance tracking, quicker adoption of new regulatory requirements, and improved data security, monitoring, and response.

“Once you start on the integration journey, it isn’t very long before you have hundreds of integrations," says Anakavur. “It is difficult to redo that volume of work, so you need a good set of ground rules and a well-designed foundation up front – and that’s just what Boomi’s new ICoE service provides.”

Business Agility, Delivered

For Gilead Sciences, an ICoE makes building connections fast, easy, and reliable. Having ownership from one centralized IT team to multiple business units has increased adoption and generated the following results to date:

• 65% reduction in incidents
• 40% improvement in delivery time
• 35% improvement in platform operations
• Reduced downtime on platform maintenance

Gilead Sciences can now produce more integrations and manage fast-changing requirements in a more agile and responsive way. What used to take six weeks to develop can now be done in less than three weeks, and IT can provide the needed functionality to its employees, patients, and hospitals.

Leveraging EDI, Gilead has strengthened compliance with "good practice" industry regulations known as GxP, governing development and production of pharmaceuticals.

Want to learn more about Boomi's approach to helping enterprises create integration centers of excellence? Read our blog, "Boomi Reinvents the Integration Center of Excellence for Digital Enterprises."

Why Boomi?

Gilead Sciences needed fast, agile integration amid growing complexity across its data and application environment. It chose Boomi for these reasons:

• ICoE services: As a key part of Boomi’s Digital Acceleration Practice, Boomi consultants help enterprises build, manage, and grow ICoEs that support community-oriented collaboration and digital innovation.
• Low-code development: Boomi’s drag-and-drop visual UI and low-code platform ensure the greatest speed and flexibility to support a wide range of projects – from the simple to the most complex.
• Reusability: Boomi enables Gilead to reuse business flows on many processes so that its IT and business teams can leverage institutional knowledge within the system against any other endpoints they integrate.
• Connectivity: Boomi's plethora of connectors to cloud applications, external vendors, and trading partners allow customers to effectively integrate with vendors, suppliers, distributors, partners, and marketplaces to simplify processes and trade smarter.

Gilead’s Recommendations for ICoE Success

Gilead Sciences’s key takeaways for establishing an ICoE include:

• A modern ICoE requires executive sponsorship and buy-in
• An ICoE is a process that continues to live, grow, and evolve
• Create a firm methodology and approach to your modern ICoE design
• Set up a base foundation with the platform and governing principles
• Monitor pain points and challenges iteratively as you realize year-over-year maturity
• Provide flexibility due to changing business requirements

"This journey is pretty enterprising in terms of the support from Gilead Sciences' leadership, who are focused on technology and data-driven analytics to enable our company to deliver data-driven diagnoses," Anakavur says.

Learn more about how Gilead Sciences is leveraging its ICoE to speed development and deliver innovation in our case study.

Want to to explore how our cloud-native platform can help you address your key IT and business challenges?  Speak with a Boomi integration expert today.