Quantum² : InfoStars : Sophie Graham-Godet

Sophie Graham-Godet

Accenture's Sophie Graham-Godet

2008 InfoStar award winner Sophie Graham-Godet is a management consultant at Accenture, a global management, technology services and outsourcing company with more than 186,000 employees at locations in 120 countries.

Formerly the head of medical information for Pfizer UK, Graham-Godet moved into her current position with the British arm of Accenture in late 2007, where she provides advice on strategy, operations and customer focus to pharmaceutical firms.
Graham-Godet was given the award for embodying the characteristic qualities of a 21st century information professional by transforming her skills and applying them in an entirely new context. She showed the type of career resilience and creativity today's professional needs in switching gears and taking on new roles in new organizations.

“I've been with the company for a year and was looking for breadth of experience whilst applying my pharmaceutical and information industry experience in new contexts,” said Graham-Godet, who counts “delighting and surprising” a new client among her favorite parts of the job.

Accenture places increasing focus on streamlined collaboration tools pulling together all forms of instant messagers, teleconferences and voicemail facilities into one place, she said modern tools of communication, such as these have become a progressively important part of the job in recent years.

“E-mail is increasingly invaluable. Accenture's connection tools to people and previous work is also something that has made my job much easier. It enables colleagues to reduce needless repetition and deliver more value to their clients,” she said, explaining that the only challenge posed by newer communication methods is “making sure you can keep adapting to it and get used to using the new tools, e.g. blogs.”

Looking to the future, Graham-Godet said information services must be ready to meet challenges posed by changes in technology as they arise.

“Information services need to be much more flexible and quicker to adapt to new technologies and ways of supporting user information needs than they have in the past,” she said.

Graham-Godet is a member of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), the Special Libraries Association (SLA) and the Pharmaceutical Information and Pharmacovigilance Association (PIPA), organizations she said have “proven useful at different times in my career to provide forums for exchanging ideas and good practice.”

“Membership (in CILIP, PIPA and SLA) has enabled me to develop meeting and people interaction skills at an early stage in my career and has also enabled interesting site visits to be conducted as part of the contacts I made by being in these groups,” she said.