AstraZeneca IT Alignment with OKRs | Case Studies WorkBoard (original) (raw)
CASE STUDY
Value Velocity at Scale: AstraZeneca’s CIDO on Aligning Strategy, Teams, and OKRs
“At the enterprise level and especially in this digital era, it's critical to have clear alignment across the entire org to make sure we're all progressing towards the right strategic priorities."
— Cindy Hoots, Chief Information Officer & Chief Digital Officer, AstraZeneca
Before WorkBoardAI
- Fragmented execution in a federated operating model:
Local autonomy drove highly localized solutions, including duplicative systems across countries, making it difficult to operate as “One IT” at enterprise scale. - Enterprise-wide alignment didn’t scale with org growth:
As AstraZeneca moved into a new digital operating model, the number of people who needed shared context more than quadrupled, increasing the difficulty of keeping teams aligned on vision, priorities, and measures. - Overlapping ownership and coverage gaps across teams:
When mapping contributions to strategic priorities, multiple teams believed they owned the same work while other critical areas had no clear owner—creating duplication, ambiguity, and missed accountability. - Legacy, industrial-era management norms slowed adaptability: The organization was accustomed to long-cycle objective-setting, siloed structures, and “red status = bad,” which made transparency, rapid course-correction, and outcome-focus harder during fast-changing conditions.
Value & Results
- Strategy-to-execution visibility through a common OKR system:
Enabled consistent measurement against the strategy and clearer line-of-sight from the four strategic pillars and priorities to what teams delivered. - Faster, higher-quality alignment conversations across a large, distributed org:
Supported shared understanding of priorities and facilitated “rich conversations” needed to resolve duplication, clarify responsibility, and coordinate trade-offs across cross-functional teams. - Improved prioritization toward outcomes over activity volume:
Reinforced “ruthless prioritization to the point of impact,” helping teams focus on a smaller set of high-impact outcomes rather than running many parallel initiatives. - Stronger operating cadence for adaptation and course correction:
Enabled shorter-cycle reviews (e.g., 90-day periods), encouraging earlier transparency, better hypothesis-testing, and quicker decisions to stop, adjust, or re-scope work based on learning.
Conclusion
AstraZeneca implemented WorkBoardAI and an OKR-driven operating cadence to improve enterprise alignment, reduce duplication, clarify ownership, and increase execution velocity during its IT 2025 strategy and operating model shift. Expanding beyond its Global IT Department, AstraZeneca is now cultivating an outcome-focused culture of alingment and transparenct.
Cindy Hoots, Chief Information Officer and Chief Digital Officer at AstraZeneca, shares how she is mobilizing a bold IT 2025 strategy across a large, distributed organization. In this podcast, Cindy explores how AstraZeneca shifted from siloed execution to cross-functional “One IT” teaming, using OKRs to drive alignment and accountability, and sustain the accelerated pace of decision-making and delivery that emerged during the uprecedented COVID epidemic.