Investing in community to drive organizational change | Dooti Roy | Data Science Hangout

Hey there, welcome to the Posit Data Science Hangout. I'm Libby Herron, and this is a recording of our weekly community call that happens every Thursday at 12 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time. If you are not joining us live, you miss out on the amazing chat that's going on. So find the link in the description where you can add our call to your calendar and come hang out with the most supportive, friendly, and funny data community you'll ever experience.

I am super excited to announce our featured leader, Dooti Roy, head of Clinical Data Science Capability Management at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. That is such a hard one to say.

I'm not blaming you. It happens to the best of us.

We're going to call it Boehringer for the rest of the time.

Sounds good.

Dooti, thank you for being here. I would love it if you could give us a little intro about yourself, what you do, but also something you like to do for fun outside of work.

Thank you so much. First of all, I first admit that this is my first ever data science hangout. So I was honestly a bit taken aback by the number of people and thanks so much to the community who joined here. Happy to see so many of you and also willing to really have a chat instead of a monologue. Libby assured me that this is exactly how it flows.

So I'm excited about that. A little bit about me, Libby mentioned my title, it's a handful. What I can do is break it down in simple language. What I do is lead the U.S. clinical data science team in Boehringer world. That means colleagues who are statisticians by training and also statistical programmers by training. This is the team that I lead. And on my second hat, which I'm also fortunate to wear, I am leading the SAS2R, or open source transformation in the company.

So really cool active space to be in and also the reason why Libby and I connected among other colleagues in Posit. So happy to be here.

Organizational change and the role of community

OK, you knew Rachel before you knew me. And I remember when I met you, one thing that you were talking about as we were preparing for this Hangout was organizational change in data science right now. This is a huge topic because we are dealing with like outside market forces that are forcing our hand and forcing us to change and examine the tools that we use in our workflows, the way that we do things. And you said that Rachel had told you don't sleep on community, don't sleep on investing in the community. And you said that you were so glad that you did. So I would love it if we could chat, start just chatting a little bit about what that organizational change looked like for you, what the challenge was and how you invested in a community and how that's changed the process.

Thanks. And this has like many part answer. So first and foremost, let's start with the part on Rachel. You're right. And I'm glad you remember. That's also my first meeting that I met her with Rachel. And I knew from the conversation that she came from a background of having kind of been in conversation with several global companies who were kind of beginning to walk towards this are open source and away from SaaS or closed source solution for coding.

And then I remember asking Rachel, I'm like, hey, what is that one thing you would advise for a beginner of the transformation process that you think people would wish the new one year in? And Rachel's answer was invest into building an internal community.

Right. And when I presented this back to my more senior leadership, the global leaders in the organization, one of the pushbacks I had was, well, you know, like we have so much other things to build. However, tools, templates, infrastructure, documentation process, like must we invest in the community? Maybe it can grow gradually. And somehow the conviction with which Rachel talked about it really convinced me. So I pushed back and I said, no, we're doing this. And I think that has therefore in the next year and a half to come, has become one of the instrumental pieces of why I think this change management part is going so well internally. From starting with the early adopters, these guys build up the community from ground up. And now it has become a safe space where people just come through questions and the community help each other out to understand things that are different from their day to day work and how to implement it and what are the challenges.

So I pushed back and I said, no, we're doing this. And I think that has therefore in the next year and a half to come, has become one of the instrumental pieces of why I think this change management part is going so well internally.

In addition, what has also happened, this community is kind of a springboard for us testing new ideas. So if we are to bring to them a new feature, a new process, a new tool, we would just go to the community and say, here is go through it over and then feedbacks. And then suddenly you have colleagues from US, from Europe, from China, from Japan. This is the spread of the data science team in Boehringer. Global feedback flows in that this is good. That's bad. Change that. Update that. Improve that. And that's so cool for product development in general. So those are the two that stand out.

The feedback loop. I remember you saying that in the beginning it felt like there was this push from above to push the change. And now that you have a community and the community is strong and healthy, that the community is pulling the change. The community wants the change to happen.

Leadership challenges in the open source transition

And I wanted to talk a little bit about the challenges that you faced with the transition and what the transition is. The transition is closed source to open source. And one of the challenges that you had mentioned to me was a leadership challenge. Like do leaders who are non-technical people, who are not embedded in the open source world, know what they are committing to when they say we are going to be open source? Could you talk a little bit about that?

Thanks. That's also a question very close to my heart. You know, like my a little bit like reflection on my own background. I was trained as a statistician, finished my PhD and then jumped into a very typical clinical trial statistician role and then found my way through the organization. I was really not really into the world of coding details. Right. I could code to save my life. Sure. Right. I mean, we all did our PhDs in using R and that's OK. But what really that meant in the open source sense, I think it has been a discovery on my part as well. And as I began to discover the world, how connected it is, like how supportive it is. It comes with a commitment of give and take. It talks about reproducibility. And then you begin to realize, I'm not so sure if everybody understands open source in the same way. And then this is something to learn by itself.

So we started having more conversations with our leadership, of course. Right. So I had the intent from the leadership to say we want to move to R slash open source. And it took a while to explain that R slash open source is not really exactly slash topic. One thing is to say I want to move a programming language away, which means you're recreating or creating new tools. But on the other end, open source comes with a whole bunch of other philosophical angles, I would almost argue. What I think is that once we started explaining these details and introducing what open source communities look like and what can you achieve, how quickly problem solving, for example, are coming together as a community to realize some of the key problem areas and come up with solutions together, which then also get adopted quicker across the board, create this buy in. The leaders begin to realize that it's a huge advantage and a positive thing.

So that's one conversation. And the other aspect of the conversation was we don't want to be just takers. We always want to give back. So this conversation around, oh, we have created a new code base or a new tool or a new template and now make it open source. And people will be like, do we need to invest a resource? And kind of, yeah, because you signed up for it. So it's easy to say we want to move to open source. But if you don't really walk the talk, then that might be a challenge. So I'm happy to report that this conversation goes very well these days. I think I'm having to fight less and less.

Less and less. I remember you saying open source is tough because it's inherently anti-capitalist. And so you're talking to these business owners and saying, OK, so here's the thing. We're going to give our competitors our tools, right?

Internal community building tips

OK, maybe just one small addition, Libby, to asking for Rachel's help in community building, because I'm a big fan of her in this regard. You know, like some of the details of, she shared and Rachel's here, so maybe she can jump in and if she remembers what she told us a year and a half back, one of the things she said is it's very important to think about the psychology of a person coming in to ask you a question and how you name your meetings, for example.

So, you know, a meeting, we have decided to call our internal meetings Big In R, so Beginner Office Hours, but Bigger Big In R. And I think by naming it this way, you immediately translate to your audience that it is completely till to be a beginner, you don't know anything, all questions are good. And I didn't really recognize, like, this little tidbit suggestions and what kind of impact it can therefore have in building community, the community gave feedback on it later on, right? What makes them feel at home and part of it was how the meeting was set up with the very name, setting a different type of expectation that you don't need to be afraid to ask, like, questions they think is naive or stupid, it's all fine.

Just again, a shout out here to really think this through on what you do with your community and also, like, take feedback from the community to understand how they are feeling when they approach the organizers of this community and what kind of space they have created. It's really helpful.

Thank you so much, Dooti. I love getting to hear those lessons through you, but I also have to give a shout out to the community at John Deere, because that's where I actually learned that about the beginner office hours. And I remember their team telling me that just by changing the name, I think they had double the amount of people who showed up for that community event.

And I'm just going to share, this is a bit of an older resource now, but if it is helpful for anyone, I had tried to collect a lot of community building tips and tricks from people and put it into this Quarto site here. So, definitely check that out, but also let me know if there's other things that you want to add to that.

But, yeah, Dooti, the way you just said that, too, about letting people know what to expect when they come to an event, I always think of it as, like, you're hosting a party at your house and you wouldn't want somebody to just show up and you don't welcome them or take their coat or show them around, show them where they can go grab a drink or food and kind of just, like, putting ourselves into a fake physical world and imagining that community event, if it's virtual, as a party.

Yeah, and thank you. I mean, with that tidbits of learnings that you shared, and you see how this gets multiplied across, right, when you tell us something, immediately, this has started happening in four countries around the world. And the user, it's a global community, but it's also regional communities with different people alternating and taking, raising their hands and leading that, and then they bring their own flavor to it. So, it's a really, like, community-driven-led piece.

And I'm so happy to see that. It's, like, it takes less and less intervention from leadership side, from my side, to do this, do that. It's, like, they're running their own show. We sometimes have conversations to kind of take into account how it's going, something that we can do to make it even easier. And that's really about it. So, it took, like, one year or roughly so to get it all up and running and in a stable state.

I think that's a great thing to call out is the time horizon, because a lot of people are like, we're going to make a community. It's going to be thriving on day two, right? No, you're looking at, like, 12 to 18 months of time horizon for things to kind of get going and to see the benefit. And during that 12 to 18 months, you are pumping a lot of time and effort into making things good.

Motivating learning and adoption

So my question is about your prior experience trying to promote open source in your current role. Is this the first time you've done that? Or have you had lots of experiences doing it? And maybe they weren't as successful or successful in different ways, right? I feel like success isn't necessarily one dimensional. So, I'm just curious about your experience having the lobby for that.

Good question. So, you know, like my background, I mentioned I was a trained statistician. And in between, what I was doing is driving statistical methodology in the company. So, in my world, it was always peer reviewed. It was always open source share, because that's methodology is only thriving as many people adopt it. So, if you publish a paper, and no one reads it, or comments on it, or have any use of it, I would ask, like, what uses that paper exactly? So, in my world, that was always part of the deal. You reach out to the community and say, I wrote something, feedbacks on that. Please. Have you tried implementing it? Here's some code. So, this was happening anyway for a while.

And then I got this mandate to say, the organization wants to move from SaaS to open source and beyond. And then that was the first time I kind of felt like I fell from a lake to ocean type of a thing. I'm like, what do I know about coding communities? And that has been also a growing journey for me to realize how amazing, intensely vast and cool this community is, right? There have been so many aspects that I've discovered on the way, and that has served as sort of like an upscaling opportunity for me.

So my question for you is, what does data science look like at your company? And how does it serve the org's internal and external missions?

Thank you for that question. So data science is really broad, right? It can basically mean everything and nothing. Within a huge pharma company, which believe it, Boehringer is, we are not publicly traded. So many people are not aware of what we do, but we are one of the top 20 largest pharma companies in the world. It's also the largest family owned pharma company. And so that's a little bit of background in the portfolio of Boehringer. I have seen in the past 5 years or so, a heavy emphasis on data driven decision making and acceleration of timelines of drug development, right?

These are common slogans you will probably hear across many other companies, but Boehringer began to think about what does that actually mean? In order to implement data driven decision making, you need the infrastructure, you need governance, you need availability of tools and templates at your fingertips. You need basically a way to extract insights rather quickly from the raw data until the formulated story that you can tell with it. So all of these kind of open areas to develop.

So, my question is about this thing that Libby just mentioned, which is documentation. So you actually mentioned when you were introducing kind of what you do and the change that you all are making at Boehringer, that documentation is one of the things that you kind of work on. And what I'd like to know is how it is that you all motivate data professionals, especially folks that are beginners in open source and all that who typically might not care that much about documentation when you get into a project to document. What are some of the things that you do for that?

That's a great question. And I can tell you, it's not just the initial people getting in, nobody likes documentation. Let's just like admit it. It's also good to admit that we are in this highly regulated industry workspace. Documentation is something you do as part of your job requirement. This is not an optional story that you say, oh yeah, I did something I forgot. And now there is no traceability or reproducibility of what you have done. And therefore what decisions you have made, this comes up in audits.

And then you get like a smack down from your leadership, say how bad this is not good. This has happened historically. I mean, my company is also more than 150 years old. They have learned their lessons. Therefore there's emphasis on maintaining documentation. What was critical for us to realize that because we are defining a whole new world, there was no templates on documents that we could rely on, right? Some of this documentation had to be created as we go.

But here, LLMs have given us an advantage for sure. I think one of the first things people started talking about LLMs where can we essentially take away some of these tasks and do it in a more efficient way. And I think that's definitely, I mean, you have probably seen examples in the industry that this is already happening. Some of this typical documentation that I created over and over again, enough templates to feed it to the LLM and say, okay, I need this and that. Can you create a draft? Great. And then you get the tedious task of editing it and make sure it's right.

Keeping up with the open source ecosystem

It's one thing to consume, like the open source content out there, such as using pharma packages and whatnot. But it's another to help motivate people in your organization to want to keep up with the pulse of what's happening, even if they're not necessarily contributing back to it, at least being aware of what's happening. So I have some thoughts, but I'd like to hear what you have to say about how do you motivate people on your team or your colleagues to not just consume these tools, really see what's happening out there and really being abreast of what's happening in the latest and greatest in some of these developments out there.

I think that question really resonates with me. Libby was right. It's basically this challenge also, which comes with having worked in a closed source environment where we would just be concerned with our templates, our way of doing it, our way of reporting it, and then forget about what are other people doing. And I think it has started to permeate. I would not say we are already there doing 100% of external awareness, but what has helped is my team is essentially a group of connected individuals who are no longer just working in one silo that they are responsible for. I see this like mashing effect to say, like coming together to help each other and they all see the bigger picture. Part of that is then sending these individuals or encouraging them to attend conferences like Posit conference, for example, or a fuse or a DIA.

In the US, I was hosting a couple of sessions in the regulatory industry stats workshop, like going to places, engaging with colleagues, and then also bringing that back to simulate that excitement to say a lot of things are happening and there is a lot to learn and a lot to give and a lot to like exchange on. But I think that this is going to take some time to really like permeate at every level of the organization. I would still say this is particularly noticeable in people who are directly involved in implementing pieces in open source and internally in the working group, but I would not say that this happens over and across. This is something, a work in progress and also an important piece.

I've been telling people this part around giving back. I think some of you may know that we had made this entire modular framework, which we call the Vinci open source. It's available. You can check it out, but it's also thinking about all these resources that we are creating internally. Somebody talked about learning. How do we start internally? We have created some really cool resources, like people are handwriting resources sometimes or coming together from different sources. My first thought was, can we make that open source? So hopefully next year, we will also push some of these internal developed tools and templates and products in the open source space. Each of this should help the community in small and large way to get there together.

Well, yeah, you capture a lot of my thoughts too. There was a situation that really motivated it. I had a really talented colleague come to me with a prototype Shiny app that was doing like high level exploratory data analysis. And I said, this looks good, but have you heard of Teal? And I showed him this and literally he's like, if I had known this, I would never have built this. Teal does everything I need. So it's just like trying to figure out how to put these little breadcrumbs in and obviously user group, internal user groups are one way of doing that. So that people come at one kind of cadence, regular cadence to inform them. But yeah, like you said, a well-connected team and just trying to spread that knowledge out, but in a way that the other people want to join on that learning journey and not just feel like they're forced to. I would agree with you, it's a work in progress.

It's about awareness, right? If people aren't aware, they can't be excited about something. And Dooti had said, with the health of the community getting better inside of Boehringer, that you've even had people who are talking to you about jobs and those people are like, I don't really care what the payer of the job is. Do I get to use the new tools? Do I get to do the fun, cool stuff? So you're obviously doing something right with creating a sense of anticipation around this cool new stuff.

Yeah, I love it. I was so glad to hear that and what Libby just shared as an anecdote, it actually happened internally. So I was talking to a colleague about a certain role and usually would expect people talk about titles, compensation, benefits, even team. They ask who is this time? I just want to use all the latest technology. Don't make me work the old way. Yeah, I was like, whoa, that's inspiring. I had never heard somebody talk about it. So there are these really positive signs, I must say.

I just want to use all the latest technology. Don't make me work the old way.

So we are all feeling community-wise very hopeful that this is going to be a good way to get into and be successful. And I wish all of you guys the same.

We are, I know. We've gone straight to the line. Well, Dooti, I really, really appreciate you hanging out with us. I'm sure you've got some place to be. I want to thank you for all of the wisdom. Thank you to the community for hanging out with us. You can save the chat if it has been helpful. Top right corner, there's three dots. And we are really excited to see you next week. We have Arielle Dror, Director of Data and Analytics at Bay FC. That's a team in the US National Women's Soccer League. So I'm really excited about that. She's going to talk all about working out loud, which is one of my favorite topics. Join us next week. I will see you in the Discord server, everybody, between now and then, and on Blue Sky and LinkedIn. Dooti, thank you so much for hanging out with us.

Thank you so much, guys. It was really, really a pleasure. Thanks a lot.

Go find Dooti on LinkedIn and say hello. Goodbye, everybody. Have a wonderful day.