Amgen session recap: How MuleSoft’s Center for Enablement accelerates innovation

IT leaders are feeling more pressure than ever before to meet the increasing needs of the business. According to our 2019 Connectivity Benchmark Report, IT is being asked to deliver 32% more projects on average year over year in addition to its more traditional role of keeping the lights on. But what happens when IT shifts its role from a central provider to an enabler to the rest of the business? At MuleSoft CONNECT San Francisco 2019, Amgen’s information systems team (represented by Haresh Patel and Harry Puri) shared how they are accelerating innovation with a decentralized Center for Enablement operating model.

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Amgen is one of the world’s leading independent biotechnology companies, with a presence in approximately 100 countries and regions worldwide. The company’s innovative medicines have reached millions of people across six key therapeutic areas: cardiovascular disease, oncology, bone health, neuroscience, nephrology and inflammation.

To truly prioritize patient health, Amgen wanted to maximize its resources for developing innovative treatments. But first, it needed to streamline internal operations, freeing up time and budget for what really matters: launching new products to the market, running global clinical trials, and investing in R&D strategy. To set its employees up for success and ensure that they were prioritizing high-impact initiatives, Amgen embraced MuleSoft’s Center for Enablement (C4E) model.

Optimize your API program with MuleSoft”s C4E

The phrase “Center for Enablement” (C4E) might recall another familiar operating model: the “Center of Excellence” (CoE). However, the two models are radically different. While a traditional CoE relies on centralized expertise and knowledge from IT, the C4E helps central IT enable business divisions to deliver projects independently. In other words, it marks a fundamental shift from a production-based to a production-and-consumption-based delivery model.

Amgen’s information systems team has discovered that distributed development with strong central governance is the best model for scale. By building out reusable APIs to hide the complexity of backend systems, internal consumers can now easily access pre-packaged system, process and experience information without having to build their own mechanisms. In this coordinated effort to manage the creation and usage of APIs, Amgen has built out a successful API program.

For example, Amgen’s new Employee Information API (hiding the complexity of Workday, LDAP and ADP systems) allows development teams to immediately access aggregated employee information, saving an average of 2 weeks development time for each project in which it is reused.

Since 2018, Amgen has created more than 25 reusable assets in Anypoint Exchange, enabling self-service to increase efficiency and accelerate time to market. Amgen plans to grow its application network even further over the next year, building a scalable enterprise that continues to make room for innovation.