Throughout his 20+ years in the industry, Mark Mintz has built a reputation for developing and delivering highly effective, customer-centered solutions and experiences to assist enterprises in transforming their digital strategy and technological infrastructures. His leadership style spans the entire delivery value chain, emphasizing business impact-driven technology, digital strategy, value realization, agile architecture, engineering, process, culture, and capability building.
Below are highlights of the interview:
Tell us about your journey and what did you do before starting your professional career?
Becoming a CIO was never my initial plan. I went to The State University of New York at Albany, where I received a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Finance, and MIS. While I was in school, technology was changing quickly, and it became clear I had a passion for both numbers and technology, so I also pursued and received a dual concentration in Finance and Information Systems. At this point in my life, I knew that I wanted my career to focus mainly on technology, and in my first job out of school, I was a technical consultant at Anderson Consulting (pre-Accenture rebranding), where I had the opportunity to focus on ERP development and implementation in Finance and Human Resources. My focus on IT and digital was a natural progression, and this passion has played a large role in shaping my career.
What was the motivation behind joining Charles River?
When I began at Charles River in February 2021, I knew I had the right skillset to help transform the company’s technological solutions and drive its long-term objectives digitally. However, the one thing that stood out to me most was the company culture. Science and technology will only get us so far if we don’t have the right people to deliver quality outcomes. Our people are the heart of our organization.
As we look to our future, we are embarking on a reimagination of how we do business and creating a culture fit through a digital journey. It includes creating an environment where our people can experience an exceptional range of formal and informal opportunities that will empower them to grow, innovate, rethink approaches, and continuously stretch themselves.
Tell us more about the company’s offerings.
Charles River is unique; we thrive on improving the quality of individuals around the world. We are passionate about the evolution of science; it guides our perspectives and ideas each day, knowing that we will change the world. In the last three years, we have had the opportunity to support the development of 85% of FDA drugs, which is a remarkable achievement for our team. Although at Charles River, each drug development process is different in providing safe and effective therapies to patients, we have the skill set to understand and adapt to each process depending on the drug. Our overall goal is to provide these offerings in a more digitalized way as technology evolves.
What are your major roles and responsibilities at the company?
The role of a CIO is always changing, and over the past decade, across all industries, the role of the CIO has expanded beyond someone who is exclusively focused on technology implementations and into one that is broader and more strategic. Today, the role of the CIO should be that of a business amplifier—partnering with business and functional leaders to leverage technology to amplify the impact that business and functional leaders aspire to achieve.
As a CIO, have you established clear IT priorities that everybody can get behind? How should a company evolve to keep up with digital technology?
Yes, at Charles River, we are working towards our goal of taking a year off of the drug development timeline. The most impactful way to achieve that is through an even greater focus on re-imagining and digitising and technology and data-enabling operations, which ladders up to elevated science and experience for our customers. My number one priority is driving a full technology-led, customer-centric, digital, data, and analytics transformation. Our digital journey will enable us to spend more time focused on science and less time on the manual efforts and administrative burden associated with complex processes. Promoting digital collaboration and data and analytics-driven operations and science with the needs of our customers at the center will allow all of our colleagues to drive value through meaningful customer interactions and world-class science while saving time on administrative tasks.
What significant changes have happened in the IT sector in the past years, and which modern technologies have disrupted it?
The IT sector is constantly changing, forcing businesses to evolve with it. Too often, tech innovations like cloud and AI are viewed as the next big thing—the wave of the future to build worlds that haven’t been thought of yet. But these innovations are tools to power meaningful change—not the change itself. As companies work to inspire the next generation of changemakers and address society’s most pressing issues, IT – both the teams and its infrastructure – needs to work with them to deliver real solutions for business problems. For organizations to build and deploy world-class digital, data, and analytics capabilities, we need IT to be a partner that brings an engineering and design focus to corporate culture.
With that being said, the cloud and AI/ML are major disruptors that enable our teams to deliver high-impact solutions at a pace and impact level that was previously just not possible. The cloud in general enables our teams to ruthlessly automate and focus on high-value business delivery. AI and ML have the potential to positively impact almost everything we do as a company. From commercial, to operational, to scientific, we have the opportunity to leverage data and analytics to focus our world-class talent on the highest impact work.
What has been the best recognition that you have received as a professional?
Throughout my years in the field, I have had several achievements that I am proud of. One is being a founding member of the McKinsey digital practice, where I have gained acknowledgement for my drive-in technology. Most recently, becoming the CIO of an S&P 500 company is an honor. Another goal that is still in the works is for Charles River to become the most prominent leader in technology, similar to the driven knowledge we have in science.
Where do you see yourself and the company in upcoming years?
High-performing talent is a must-have to create an impact through technology. Right now, we are building a culture and operating environment, linked to our mission, that attracts, excites, and retains world-class talent and is agile, customer-obsessed, and leverages modern technology to innovate. This is a major focus every day and one that will continue to evolve to ensure we create an environment where the best people are empowered and properly enabled to do great things.
Success in our digital journey will mean that we have re-imagined and digital, tech, data, and analytics enabled our most important and high-impact work such that we have been successful in achieving our mission of taking a year or more off of the drug development timeline. Achieving this means we will have become an Agile, customer-obsessed organization that can move quickly and collaborate with our customers, partners, and colleagues to deliver high-impact technology that drives direct business and customer outcomes.
Website: www.criver.com
