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Victoria Gamerman, Global Head of Digital Transformation, Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Victoria Gamerman, Global Head of Digital Transformation, Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Describe your career to date

As the current leader of the Digital Transformation Center of Excellence, I am driving the vision, strategy, and execution of digital and data transformation in Clinical Development and Operations. My role involves implementing digital innovation and data strategies, managing the data and analytics portfolio, and collaborating with both internal teams and external partners. People are at the core of this evolution and a key to our success is driving the organizational culture, specifically to develop and establish a digital mindset in collaboration with partners.

Before this, as the Global Head of Data Governance and Insights, I built a team of multidisciplinary experts focused on establishing a data-appreciative mindset, ensuring quality data collection, protection, and availability, and enabling our experts to make evidence-based decisions. The team works on use cases while also building out a data foundation for the organization.

I held several roles in the Biostatistics and Data Sciences organization including leadership of teams and content around generating real-world evidence for clinical development. I am deeply involved with the data and analytics community as demonstrated through various member and leadership roles including being part of the American Statistical Association and Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association.

I am a Scholar-Professional Adjunct Professor at Columbia University teaching Strategy and Analytics as well as currently mentoring digital health and life sciences startups at NYU’s Stern Business School Endless Frontier Labs startup accelerator program as a data and artificial intelligence (AI) advisor. I have formal training in data science with a PhD and MS in Biostatistics from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine as well as an MA and BA in Mathematics from Boston University.

I am trained in scrum and agile methodologies (product owner and scrum master) as well as design thinking, which have defined my product- and customer-centric approaches to critical business problem solving with data and analytics.

How are you developing the data literacy of your organization, including the skills of your data teams and of your business stakeholders?

Data literacy for the organization starts with a foundation of shared and common goals towards leveraging data as an asset. In this way, the data literacy needs from across our organization are embedded into our data strategy, which is linked to key organizational deliverables and measures driven by business strategy. Starting both top down and bottom up, we have a divide and conquer approach.

First, looking inward into the Digital Transformation organization, we regularly maintain and train ourselves on understanding deeply the business and domain we operate in and the latest advances in methodologies and technologies. In this way, we can act as business-to-data translators. We train in design thinking methodologies and leverage expertise in UX design to ensure we can uncover true organizational needs beyond what is on the surface.

Tackling the understanding of data and analytics with leadership peers is a primary goal of the data strategy. Here, the exploration of business needs, business goal alignment, and other priority project involvement allows us to have conversations and provide information on data and analytics on demand.

We also participate in and provide training and input through an organization-wide education initiative to elevate the overall knowledge of data and analytics related topics to colleagues who are leaders and individual contributors across the organization. The goal of increasing data literacy is to enable our business to make smart decisions. The data transformation organization serves as a strategic partner with a hospitality-like approach to deliver our goals and transform lives for generations.

What role do you play in building and delivering conventional AI solutions, including machine learning models? Are you involved in your organization’s adoptions of generative AI?

The team is at the core of the assessment, development, and adoption of novel data, analytics, and technologies, including generative AI, for the organization. My specific responsibility as Global Head of Digital Transformation is to ensure that we have an established data strategy, which includes initiatives that support curiosity and learning fast.

The team is responsible for connecting with experts across the organization to leverage collective intelligence on AI opportunities and implementation. We have explored several business-inspired areas where advances in AI would allow us to deliver value and speed above and beyond standard approaches.

We have also been at the leadership of ensuring that such approaches are considered holistically and thoughtfully, discussing the topics internally in various forums to exchange knowledge with others and engaging with the broader community.

Have you been able to fix the data foundations of your organization, particularly with regard to data quality?

While the Global Head of Data Governance and Insights, I was instrumental in strengthening our organization’s data foundations. I joined the Digital Transformation Center of Excellence with a rich background in clinical trials and drug development. My primary task was to establish a target operating model for data governance, focusing on novel data reuse. In just six months, I assembled a team of internal and external talents, who quickly began assessing our data landscape. They refined their working methods, established partnerships, and optimized operations to embed themselves within key existing teams and processes, leading to significant improvements in our data quality and governance.

My leadership has been pivotal in wrapping up crucial business deliverables and driving the organization towards a productive future. The team has delivered training on various data sources and applications, fostering a foundation for the desired data culture. They have also developed multiple dashboards to serve different stakeholders, from operational staff to board members.

Under my guidance, the team continues to explore novel opportunities within the technology ecosystem to ensure a best-in-breed approach to data governance. This has enabled us to deliver in three months what had not been achieved in the previous three years, significantly enhancing our data foundations.

Victoria Gamerman
has been included in:

100 Brands 2024 (USA)

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Victoria Gamerman, Global Head of Digital Transformation, Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Join our membership network of over 250 global senior data and AI leaders.

The trusted global collaboration and intelligence platform for data leaders.

Join our membership network of over 250
global senior data and AI leaders.