While Genentech’s scientists busily sequence DNA, a team of techies at the biotech company is quietly reinventing how information technology and business interact.

This daring approach to human-expert interaction is taking place in Genentech’s network of buildings that ring Oyster Point in south San Francisco, at the northern reaches of Silicon Valley.

At its heart is Todd Pierce, a hyper-kinetic Texan high-tech guru.

IT as a field is not renowned for its bedside manner. Yet, Genentech’s tech team is “empathy-driven – that’s our core competence and differentiation,” explains Mr Pierce, whose official title is VP of CIT [Corporate IT].

Pierce’s idea of infusing “emotional intelligence” into the IT department ran counter to the culture he inherited in 2004. “We were difficult to work with, unresponsive,” he says. “Our big value-add is to improve the user experience – make it easier and faster.”

To put these ideas to the test, Mr Pierce planned a way to defuse Genentech’s “power users” of IT resources – squeaky wheels who demand the most attention. Mr Pierce teamed up with Ideo, a Silicon Valley consultancy known for innovative design, product and workflow solutions. In February 2005, they invited Genentech’s 120 most “extreme users of IT” to attend a two-day workshop at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. He worked with Ideo to set up a “studio” aimed at solving each of these power users’ computing problems.

In a triumph for soft skills, the IT team learned a lot. “We taught our staff a mindset and [gave them] a set of tools that they can use to address any customer problems,” says Mr Pierce, “even ones that seemed unsolvable given what we know or have.”

Tangible outcomes of the workshop included a “self-service kiosk for password resets which used to be the number one reason people called our service desk”, says Mr Pierce. And Genentech’s IT team surveys users after every request for services.

Mr Pierce is a trendsetter with collaborative skills but his approach to IT governance is fairly standard for an organisation with 10,000 employees and $9.3bn in revenue for fiscal 2006.

Mr Pierce meets once or twice a week on average with his boss David Ebersman, Genentech’s chief financial officer. “We regularly exchange e-mails – we have an e-mail-oriented culture,” Mr Pierce explains.

Many of his e-mails go to Arthur D Levinson, chairman and chief executive, who is famous for his responsiveness and knowledge of IT, says Mr Pierce. “I can talk to him about firmware, storage and motherboards,” he marvels. “There’s no level of detail that I can’t discuss with him.”

Like Mr Levinson, the majority of Genentech employees carry BlackBerrys for phone and e-mail – everyone is accessible. The campus features a cellular data network and Wi-Fi access to promote mobility and collaboration.

The persistent connection supports Genentech’s informal business culture, one in which Mr Pierce says he can “pitch weird ideas and Levinson can give me valuable feedback”.

The culture seems casual but is not without structure. To obtain management buy-in and funding for IT initiatives, Mr Pierce initiated a management layer between himself and his bosses – the IT Strategy Council.

He chairs this group of heads of five departments who set and approve IT spending and policies. Each department has a 36-month IT roadmap. Mr Pierce says the bar of success is set higher all the time: “Even though we’re part of Genentech, we are constantly upping our game.”

Having seen IT departments overspend on hardware and massive software projects in the 1990s, corporations such as Genentech have taken a different course in recent years, placing IT budgets on a short leash and transforming IT into an internal service provider.

Some companies have asked their IT departments to bid against outsourcers for everything from website development to hosting projects. This trend does not seem to bother Mr Pierce.

“We’re moving away from being a service provider to somebody who helps you achieve benefits,” he says. Every IT project has a six-month review to see whether it achieved intended benefits.

Mr Pierce’s group does not know how to clone proteins, but they must support the scientists – up to a point. There are specialists who can come in and fine-tune scientific instruments.

“My specialty is lifecycle management of technology – so scientists don’t have to futz with the tools,” he explains.

The corporate IT department participates in weekly meetings with scientists to see where demand is headed: “We don’t want to be on their critical path. We don’t want them to have to wait for IT.” Indeed, speed is Genentech’s modus operandi. “A sense of urgency and time is critical to this company,” he says.

Mr Pierce’s other great concern is keeping the IT team aligned with Genentech’s focus areas of oncology, immunology and tissue growth and repair. At the IT department’s quarterly team meetings, he often invites a patient to attend – someone who uses one of Genentech’s signature drugs, such as Avastin, for cancer; Activase, for stroke victims; and Herceptin, a breast-cancer treatment.

“We always have a patient, physician or a technical group leader meet with us,” he says. “There’s no one here who hasn’t been impacted in some way by our products. One of my direct reports was diagnosed with stage four bile-duct cancer [in May 2005] and was given six weeks to live.”

The IT employee was 40 years old, married with two daughters. Doctors told him he was “inoperable, with no treatment” available, says Mr Pierce. As a last resort, Mr Pierce says, doctors at nearby Stanford University’s research hospital prescribed Genentech’s Avastin and “he lived a year and a half”.

Mr Pierce, who holds a Master of Arts in Health Policy and Administration from the University of California-Berkeley, describes working at Genentech as his calling. “Patients, science – that’s the name of the game. We spend a lot of time making sure people understand what we’re doing.”

In a biotech company where IT plays a supporting role to science, he is appropriately humble about the mission. This is evident in his attempts to simplify IT. For instance, he says his team is responsible for 2,800 applications. His goal is to pare this back to about 500.

“If we’re not making things simpler or faster, we’re not headed in the right direction,” he says.

In this respect, too, Mr Pierce’s approach is counter to that of many of his peers in IT. “I got into IT because I love change and innovation,” he says. “I picked biotech because I think that’s where the biggest rate of innovation is happening in society. I think the IT innovation curve is flattening and that the biotech innovation curve is just getting started.”

His soft-skills approach to IT and business communications might not spread virally to other companies but it does turn a few heads. Mr Pierce says he does not want to overstate the role of IT at Genentech. But, he adds, with a little prodding: “The velocity and volume of innovation wouldn’t be possible without IT.”