I work in the pharmaceutical industry and I saw at the end of last year that a couple of the major pharma companies, Novartis and GSK had hired or were hiring Chief Digital Officers (CDO). That wasn't necessarily a surprise, the increasing use of data, particularly patient data to inform drug development, along side efforts to engage with patients or potential patients using social media is increasingly critical in the pharma industry. Data is big business in pharma, and the fact that Amazon, Google (via Alphabet and Verily), and Facebook are all making their presence felt in different health-relatated fields demonstrates that very clearly. The new CDO hires did make me ask myself though how many pharma companies had someone with a specific "information" responsibility in their C-Suite? I didn't have time to look at every company but I did look across the top 20 companies (by pharma sales in 2016). The results are in the attached Excel file. What did I learn? Only of a quarter of the companies have either a Chief Information Officer (CIO) or Chief Digital Officer (CDO). However a further 9 did have a C-Suite officer responsible either for IT or more commonly for Compliance. I looked to see if I could find something of their job description or objectives. I've highlighted on the sheet where they have clear information-related objectives. Interestingly, in light of the current project to re-publish the "Information as an Asset - a board agenda" publication one C-Suite officer, at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), does specifically mention being responsible for the "information assets" of the organisation. What I also found interesting is the 4 out of the 5 CIO/CDOs had an engineering education. Is that something we as information professionals could explore further? Are there skills that are being developed as part of that education that we could adopt and learn from? Worth a further look I think...watch out for a later blog. I'm not offering any major conclusions from this exercise, but it did make me wonder how this compares to other industries. Let me know if any of you have any data you would like to share.