Suresh Martha is the Head of Data-Driven Innovation and Analytics at Rockland, Massachusetts-based EMD Serono, the healthcare business of Merck KGaA of Germany. Its products treat infertility, multiple sclerosis, and cancer.
Martha leads two different data science practices at EMD Serono, as well as the commercial dashboarding and analytics practice. “Wherever we can move that needle to increase the dollar amount [products generate] or increase efficiencies, that’s what we are going after,” he says.
Martha started in the financial services sector and then went on to the sports industry, most notably with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
We spoke with him earlier this year as part of our research report, Creating New Value in Large Organizations: What It Takes.
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Tell us about your current role, and how past professional experiences tie into your current role.
I am on the healthcare side of the business, looking at our existing data and trying to identify the right set of doctors or hospitals that we should target or pursue once a drug is approved or going to market.
I was on the team building out the entire system to support ticketing, batch printing, and security for events. I was in Johannesburg for about a year and a half. I then moved back to Boston in 2010, working with a financing company on State Street. Then, I worked with online banking, and eventually, healthcare. Everything I have done in my career is related to data, analytics, or AI/ML, finding insights or creating dashboards to solve business questions.
How does your division, department, or unit define value creation in 2024?
Once a drug is approved, then we get involved in deciding what our field sizing looks like. How many people do you need in what geographical location? Fine-tuning that model or the go-to-market model is one of the aspects of what we do. If it’s a new drug launch, we identify the right set of doctors who have the right set of patients for our drug. We have a company-wide impact with any launched product.
As long as you are impacting the business based on whatever your role is, it is value creation… If you can use data, analytics, or AI to increase efficiency, that’s definitely value creation…
…With generative AI coming into the market, the value creation is more of a question of how we can increase our efficiency with generative AI tools. How can we create some marketing content with less effort using some of these GenAI tools? …How can we use GenAI to produce some of the insights that an end user might not get by just looking at a dashboard?
Do you feel like your working definition of value creation has pivoted relative to 2023? Or has it been nuanced and steady?
Yeah, there’s definitely a mix of both. Based on my role, we use commercial dashboarding tools and traditional AI to answer some of the questions and make some predictions. But with generative AI coming into the market, the value creation is more of a question of how we can increase our efficiency with generative AI tools. How can we create some marketing content with less effort using some of these GenAI tools? How can we use GenAI even though we are working with data? How can we use GenAI to produce some of the insights that an end user might not get by just looking at a dashboard? Some of these GenAI tools actually look at your data and are able to tell you in plain, natural English language what you should be looking at in this dashboard: What’s up, what’s down, why it’s up, and why it’s down.
How have you managed the response to the AI hype cycle, and what have you identified as the real business impact of AI as the voice of all things digital within a large organization?
One thing that worked in our favor, especially in the healthcare industry, which is a highly regulated industry, is that everything gets scrutinized. Even though there are vendors who are trying to pitch [tools to] all the senior leadership, there are guard rails within the company to make sure that anything we buy goes through a proper security review. And then there is a governance mechanism [to] make sure it’s actually solving the problem. In general, we have a tight framework for evaluating anything we bring into the company and, from a security standpoint, ensuring that our data is protected.
We also don’t want to slow down in terms of this evolution of technology. So we do have a committee that helps educate some of the leaders and sub-departments. We have some internal tools for GenAI [and] we try to encourage all our employees to use it. There’s definitely another forum that is focused on encouraging the employee to adapt to this technology in a secure way.
How do you view the role of new technologies in value creation? Which new technologies are you looking at?
I have one team that’s really focused on commercial dashboards. Tableau has its own generative AI capability. We use Tableau as a visualization tool, and Tableau launched its own generative AI capability, which is sitting on top of a really good analytical architecture. We are piloting that now to enable our executives to get natural language analytics [from existing dashboards]. They can ask questions and get a response back without waiting for my team, or it can build a dashboard for them.
One of the overarching goals for my team [relates to] our stakeholders spending at least 20 to 25 minutes on a dashboard to figure out what they need to know. How can we cut down that time, so that they can focus on things that they are good at?
What is the role of talent in value-creation efforts?
If we can make our stakeholders more efficient, that’s one way. If we can create solutions, whether it’s a data analytic solution or AI solution, that would help do our targeting in a more precise way, that’s value creation for us. If we can retain one patient a little bit longer on our drug, that’s value creation for us. If we can increase the efficiency of our marketing team and our sales team, that’s value creation for us. Wherever we can move that needle to increase the dollar amount [products generate] or increase efficiencies, that’s what we are going after. As a team, we need to know how value creation has an impact on talent and how talent has an impact on value creation. It’s actually a huge impact.
There are two things on the talent side. One is getting the right experienced person who knows the stuff. The second way is the willingness to adopt new technology and explore with the vendor also what’s out there, and bring that into the company. It doesn’t need to be whoever you are hiring who knows or can do all the coding. As long as they understand basic stuff and then have a willingness to adopt and learn new technology, explore or evaluate new vendor tools and technology, and bring that back to the company.
Go to conferences, build a network, and learn as much as you can from outside of the company…
What is one piece of advice you commonly share with other innovators in big companies?
One of the things I have seen in some of the big companies is that people stay at the company for a longer period of time and don’t really go to conferences or interact with other leaders. My recommendation, at least what I do, is I like to go out to conferences, I have these interactions, and I even switch companies. If you have been in the company for 40 years, you might not learn anything new… Go to conferences, build a network, and learn as much as you can from outside of the company… From a career perspective, it is really good to network. You never know; you might end up working for him or us at some point. That’s one thing. The second thing is that it obviously broadens your scope of what you’re doing today, after you have this discussion and know what other companies are doing.
