Global to Local: How Good Governance Drives Adoption and Innovation

Meaningful governance is most successful when it is built with cross-functional decision-makers who are engaged early and often. This is a key tactic for Boehringer Ingelheim and one of the recommendations shared recently with Veeva’s Stefan Langthaler, director of Veeva CRM strategy, Europe.

In their discussion, Hetal Patel, Global Head of Stakeholder Engagement; Rakesh Vashishta, Global Head of Customer Facing Execution Excellence; and Lucas Tasch, Corporate Executive Director, IT Customer Facing Excellence, from Boehringer Ingelheim focused on key challenges in building and sustaining a widely adopted CRM. Some of those challenges include:

1. Building a governance process that engages all CRM users. Boehringer Ingelheim works with a one-team mindset that keeps each stakeholder in mind as they improve governance functionality and flexibility.
2. Addressing the multiple priorities of both global and local users. The Boehringer Ingelheim solution to successfully balancing the needs of both local and global stakeholders is strong communication.
3. Maintaining a feedback loop beyond the build and launch. Their commitment to building a living community keeps teams engaged and ensures governance principles are followed.

Challenge 1: Building a governance process that engages all CRM users.

While governance should guide current and future decisions, users may not see the long-term value—especially as new policies or solutions don’t seem relevant to their everyday challenges. Learn how adding the right decision-makers early can help users see themselves in governance functionality and flexibility.

Q: What are the principles for success when it comes to governance?

• Rakesh Vashishta (RV): At the point of build and beyond, establish a one-team mindset where contributors from across the business are involved in decision-making. Assemble a cross-functional project team representing each constituency’s voice across the company. Each stakeholder will have confidence in following new procedures because their representatives have a seat at the table and an equal voice in decision-making.
• Hetal Patel (HP): When creating that cross-functional team, do so with a proactive approach—with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Bring a member of medical into the team early, well before medical issues stall the process.
• Lukas Tasch (LT): In the beginning, it’s also helpful to set goals in a unified way—such as setting utilization and adoption rates that you can refer to down the line. Adding experts in the technical aspects of the CRM and data usage is also important—this will build confidence with users on the integrity of the technology and the data.

Challenge 2: Addressing the multiple priorities of both global and local users.

Successfully balancing responses to local, regional, and global stakeholders can impact your CRM’s utilization, especially after you make improvements. The solution can be as simple as establishing meaningful communications, as the team discusses below.

Q: How can you equally manage global and local stakeholders, or is that even possible?

• HP: Communicate a common baseline, where everyone understands the reason behind the functionality for each stakeholder—including explanations of how the variations of core standard features influence better adoption. Then when it comes time for improvements, you can provide flexibility based on this shared understanding.
• RV: The best communication channels are two-way channels, where information flows to and from leadership and cross-functional teams to each region and market. With this flow, you create a trusted resource that shares what is and isn’t working and what needs to change.

Q: What do you have in place that works when global demands compete for resources?

• RV: When running global governance, you must accept that there aren’t enough resources to address every concern. That’s why we manage requests fairly and transparently using a committee to help prioritize requests.
• LT: We rank requests on whether they’re technically feasible and will bring value to the business. We won’t proceed with those fixes if they don’t match these criteria. But we don’t completely delete these requests; we keep a backlog to screen later for potential future projects.

Challenge 3: A feedback loop between stakeholders is active during build and launch but tough to keep alive.

Once you launch the CRM and put governance in place, the teams that worked together across communities and countries tend to go silent. All that engagement and collaboration ends. Instead, the goal should be to keep these connections alive by building a living community that continues throughout the life of the CRM and ensures users follow governance principles.

Q: What is the roadmap for keeping the BI communities together?

• RV: Global and local communities can learn from each other, which can help limit the number of issues that escalate to an IT or business team. We put in place monthly calls with cross-functional teams. These forums became a valued opportunity to surface challenges, share success, and encourage stakeholders to help each other solve issues. Every so often, provide value-add education as the payoff for staying engaged.
• HP: These conversations are even more valuable when establishing a feedback loop between corporate and customers in the countries and regions where the rollout is critical. Consider building into your communications plan quarterly touchpoints with medical counterparts in these regions to keep everyone current and aware.
• LT: Besides sharing solutions among stakeholders, these collaborative conversations can often generate new ideas that improve governance and CRM processes.

Tips to keep governance relevant and functional across your regional and global communities.

1. Adopt a one-team mindset by including all stakeholders from business units, medical, and IT in early decisions and governance adaptions.
2. Build trust through two-way communication and connections between local and global stakeholders.
3. Establish and promote a living community where all stakeholders connect frequently—learning from each other as they share successes and solve problems.

Attend 2023 Commercial Summit, Europe to learn more from Veeva and your colleagues.