Dive Brief:

• Johnson & Johnson tapped Jim Swanson to serve as EVP and group chief information officer, according to Swanson's Linkedin. 

• Swanson joined the pharmaceutical and consumer goods company this month. Previously he was the CIO and head of digital transformation, crop science at Bayer and spend almost five years as CIO of Monsanto.

• Swanson's appointment fills the vacancy created by former CIO Stuart McGuigan, who joined the U.S. Department of State in March. J&J did not respond by publication time.

Dive Insight:

McGuigan left a legacy of transformation at J&J, leading a technology portfolio that required continuous consolidation. Every time J&J made an acquisition, it had to weave the company's technology into its system. 

Early focus for McGuigan, who joined J&J in 2012, was enacting a five-year program to move all computing to hybrid cloud, he told CIO Dive in an interview last year. 

With backbone technology modernized, attention turned to what's next. McGuigan had turned attention to artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have the potential to disrupt the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry. 

Part of the appeal is the potential for personalization. 

This is in part where Swanson comes in. At Bayer, Swanson led a team which incorporated data science to help respond to customer needs and be more "agile, adaptive and responsive," he said, in a Bayer video last year. 

Data orchestration underlies AI and ML. When systems are set up effectively, companies can quickly adapt to business changes or identify new revenue streams. 

J&J is one of many pharmaceutical companies facing legal turmoil following the opioid epidemic and agreed this week to by $20.4 million to settle lawsuits in Ohio, BioPharma Dive reports.