CIO Podcast: Wellcome Trust CTO James Thomas

Wellcome Trust chief technology officer (CTO) James Thomas told a Horizon CIO Network roundtable how his organisation has built a new operation with data and change at its heart. Talking to CIO and CTO peers from FTSE 100 organisations Thomas gives a frank insight into how to deliver change and reveals how he created a new culture and set of measurements to benefit the organisation and its technologists. The Wellcome Trust is headquartered in central London, but owes its philanthropic heritage to an American, Sir Henry Welcome who moved to the UK in 1880 to set up a pharmacy business, one which thrived and went on to become one of the most important global makers of treatments, for example inventing the tablet. As well as building a pharmaceutical giant, Sir Henry Wellcome was passionate and curious about medicine and travelled the word collecting artefacts and history about the treatment of illness and its cures, all of which is today housed in the Wellcome Collection in London, just a stone’s throw from the St Pancras Eurostar terminal. Over the last three years Thomas has been operating on getting the technology and technologists of the Wellcome Trust fit for the changing landscape any organisation faces. “We created a new target operating model (TOM) which set out how to get us away from old ways of working. For example, we delivered projects to parts of the Wellcome Trust to a timeline they set,” Thomas adds that this had the potential to create issues with the technology operations. As CIO of the UCLH hospital in London, Thomas pioneered the use of customer journeys for patients visiting a hospital for a treatment and the CTO brought that same level of experience to the Wellcome Trust. For scientists seeking Wellcome Trust funding to research a cure or treatment the route to funding, Thomas found, was complicated and did not serve the Wellcome Trust or the scientist well. Tune in to hear more.

You can listen to CIO Podcast: Wellcome Trust CTO James Thomas online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

CIO Podcast: Wellcome Trust CTO James Thomas is an episode from Horizon CIO Podcast by Matt Gore.

This episode is 35:10 long.

This episode was published on Oct 3, 2019.

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