We spoke to MSD's Claire Kelly about the growth of digital skills and the role they will play in the future of work.
Can you tell me a bit about the role digital and tech skills now have in the workplace?
Yeah, so I suppose prior to Covid, my teams would have been global so we would
have always had to rely on technology in that respect but obviously since Covid, it's even more so,
given that our team members who used to co-locate are now all remote.
But it's really important, we won't be able to work as a cohesive team without it. We have team members
in KL in Malaysia, in San José in Costa Rica, in Prague and Dublin as well. From my perspective,
I would use Teams quite a bit to work with the various team members and I would use
chat and then we would collaborate on documentation and we would also then obviously
have all our meetings so that's an amazing tool and I suppose things have come a long way since
when I first started and we used to have to send emails to each other and say, you know, 'who's in
the spreadsheet?' so it's amazing how quickly technology has progressed in that respect.
We've adopted the agile ways of working and framework so we would use the Jira tool to track
and manage our day-to-day tasks, which is great. When you're remote you really have to
make time and effort for the softer side of things. Things that would naturally
happen in an office where you just learn more about a person, that doesn't naturally happen remotely.
So it's something you have to really focus on and make sure that you are connecting with your
your team members and your stakeholders because otherwise, you know, that's how I think we get
things done is through working with people so it's a really important component in my opinion.
And then in terms of digital upskilling, how can businesses integrate that more effectively?
Yeah, so things are moving so fast now. In the past you would have had time,
you know, a tool would have come into being and you would have had time
to upskill and to become an expert on the tool. However now things are
moving so fast, a tool comes in and then it can almost be outdated
every time you're getting comfortable with it so I suppose, in my opinion, what we need to do
is we really need to carve out time for people to be able to upskill and experiment
these tools are really powerful so you need the time to really
invest and experiment and understand because often what you learn in a standard
training session, it will get you a certain part of the way but often it's true experimentation
that you really can see how a particular tool or technology can bring value to the business.
And then, within MSD, what role does AI and data analysis play when it comes to work processes in the future?
Yeah so it's a really exciting space here. Within our programmes we
have the citizen development and that's where we are putting the tools
into the hands of the business where we've been able to have citizens come on board and
bring RPA and automation to bear on some of their processes so that's a really
exciting space and we're replicating that now with the analytics and looking to also do the same
with the process mining. So I think that's really the way of the future and
as the tools get more user friendly, it makes sense to allow our business to be able to do it.
From the reporting and analytics space, the demand is huge and we have so much data and so much powerful
data and really it's about identifying what we need to bring to the
business to bring value. How do we do that in a kind of a smart way
so that we're reducing our technical debt, bringing in automations into that space as well,
but also meeting the needs and the demands of the business and everything that we
we do that can bring these improvements and support the business,
that means that, if our process are getting leaner, that we are essentially supporting being able to bring
the medicines to our patients in a more timely manner and that's I suppose one of the key
goals and something that we don't want to lose sight of.
Thank you very much Claire.
No, thank you.