Digital brings benefits and risks to enterprise but empowers workforce, says Bayer CDO

Bayer CDO Jessica Federer tells Computing that digital tools like online collaboration software bring risks to large firms, but the potential reward is huge

Deployment of cloud collaboration tools and other online sharing services within the enterprise brings both benefits and risks, but their use can empower the workforce to become more efficient and create new business models.

That's according to Jessica Federer, chief digital officer (CDO) at multinational pharmaceutical corporation Bayer, who describes her key responsibility as "bringing together and connecting the dots in digital".

Digital is driving innovation across Bayer and has the potential to "change everything" about how value is measured in healthcare, Federer argued during her keynote at the recent Open Mobile Summit in London.

By pushing forward with a digital strategy, Bayer - a company that is over 150 years old and has 120,000 employees - is able to "become more efficient and create new business models" through the deployment of digital technology from "pretty much every tech company you can imagine", Bayer told Computing.

However, she said the company needs to carefully manage the use of cloud-based collaboration tools to ensure data privacy is maintained.

"We deal with a lot of sensitive data as an innovation company," Federer said. "We have a data privacy officer who works very closely with compliance and pays very close attention to policy developments and data privacy, because this is a rapidly evolving area from a policy and regulation perspective. As a big organisation we have to be very, very cautious."

The shift towards digital requires a lot of end-user education and training, she said.

"Digitisation has changed how we all work... We need to make it easy and accessible for all our employees and help them to adapt to work in a digital way and to develop great digital skills and stay competitive," Federer said. "Digital is a people topic, not a technology topic, because it's about how we work together with technology."

For Federer, the key question around going digital is "how do we take the workforce we have and empower them to work in a new environment?".

"You have a great workforce with wonderful capabilities so how do we help them to continue to develop to mirror the needs of the marketplace?"

Al Peasland, head of technical partnerships at Infiniti Red Bull Racing, recently told Computing how cloud-based collaboration tools are helping the Formula 1 team.

Computing's full interview with Bayer CDO Jessica Federer will be published shortly.