How Novartis is unifying its scientific computing environment
A single SCE for innovation and compliance
Key Takeaways
Support diverse roles in one platform
Enable statisticians, programmers, and data scientists to work in a shared environment with the flexibility and tooling each group needs.
Validate only what matters
Isolate production runs for validation to accelerate workflows while maintaining regulatory compliance.
Streamline work with abstractions
Use workflow templates and orchestration tools to reduce manual effort and ensure reproducibility across complex studies.
Novartis’s biostatistics and data science teams support a wide spectrum of analytical work, from statistical programmers responsible for delivering hundreds of clinical trial outputs to data scientists working on petabyte-scale omics and imaging studies. Historically, this work was performed across disconnected systems. These included a validated GxP environment for regulatory analysis, a separate exploratory environment for early-stage work, and legacy tools like Excel for managing metadata. This fragmented setup made it difficult to collaborate, scale, and deliver consistently in a regulated setting.
Building a single platform for both rigor and flexibility
To address these silos, Novartis is building a unified scientific computing environment built on Domino. The team’s strategy focuses on validating only what’s truly required, such as automated, non-interactive production runs used for regulatory submissions. The rest of the platform remains flexible to support exploration, prototyping, and collaboration.
Novartis layers custom tools and templates on top of Domino’s core platform to simplify project setup and orchestration. For example, one tool automatically structures a clinical project and injects metadata from upstream systems, helping teams standardize execution and link with other parts of the organization. This architecture allows Novartis to scale its processes without overburdening teams with validation and manual steps.
How Novartis is evolving its SCE architecture:
- Validated runs: Lock down execution of critical outputs like tables and listings
- Flexible development: Allow users to build their own workspaces and use preferred tools
- Deliverable orchestration: Use reusable workflows to efficiently manage 600+ trial outputs per study
- Metadata integration: Connect the SCE to upstream clinical systems
Designing for scale, compliance, and usability
Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach, the Novartis team designed the platform with different user groups in mind. Business users work through simplified interfaces, while “power users” who prefer direct access to compute, Git, and orchestration tools access Domino directly. These tools are designed to be transparent, giving users visibility into what’s happening and why, without creating black-box processes.
Governance is closely aligned with quality and compliance teams. Rather than applying validation to the entire platform, the team worked with stakeholders to define where structure and auditability are truly needed, ensuring GxP deliverables are traceable, while enabling agility elsewhere.
The key is making it easy for anyone to get started, while still giving advanced users full control when they need it.
James Black
Executive Director, Technology & Scientific Computing
Accelerating innovation without compromising compliance
Though the new environment is still rolling out, Novartis has already seen early gains in usability, collaboration, and scalability. By combining flexibility with targeted validation, the team is enabling a new model for clinical reporting that supports diverse workflows without sacrificing compliance or speed.
