[BreachExchange] Practical CIO: Agility, speed, and business alignment

[Destry Winant]

https://www.zdnet.com/article/practical-cio-agility-speed-and-business-alignment/

The big CIO themes today include agility, speed, customer experience,
and business alignment. In truth, these concepts are not new although
the rise of technology as a strategic business enabler means the CIO
mandate is now innovation and growth rather than stability.

In contrast to the past, where the goal of IT was system stability,
today operational excellence is table stakes. Organizational leaders
expect the CIO to maintain security and stability while reducing costs
and increasing business innovation.

Of course, balancing these competing priorities is easier said than
done. Business needs are a moving target, IT does not have enough
resources, there is never enough time, and a host of other obstacles
are always present. Overcoming these obstacles defines the CIO role;
that's what CIOs must do.

Because these topics are crucial, I invited two CIO practitioners to
explore these issues on episode 304 of the CXOTalk series of
conversations with innovators.

Isaac Sacolick is a former CIO and CTO who wrote a book that offers
advice to CIOs on facing the points I just described. The book is
called Driving Digital: The Leader's Guide to Business Transformation
Through Technology.

Christopher Houser is CIO of Signature HealthCARE, a leading provider
of long-term care, short-term care, managing skilled nursing
facilities, assisted living facilities, rehab, home health, and
cognitive care. The company operates in ten states and has 115
locations.

Watch the entire discussion in the video embedded above and download
the podcast. A few edited comments are below, and you can also read
the entire transcript.

What are the foundations of modern CIO strategy?

Isaac Sacolick: Today, we're talking about not just keeping the lights
on and keeping things stable. We're also not just talking about
process improvement and cost reduction. We're talking about growth.
We're talking about aiming at new markets and improving customer
experiences so that our businesses can be competitive over the next
five years.

The CIO's strategy needs to look at both short-term and long-term
opportunities around that and craft a strategy, a program, and an
execution plan around that.

How do you balance innovation vs. operational stability?

Christopher Houser: It's a careful balance. When I first started
seven, eight months ago, we were focused primarily on IT, keeping the
lights on, so end user requests: I need a new computer; I need a new
phone; the system is down; it's broke.

Moving away from that, keeping the email system up and running,
keeping the network up, that's standard operating procedure, so that's
our job, regardless.

We're reshaping our team to be more business-focused when it comes to
relationship management. We have built a project management office.
We've put centers of excellence within our groups focused on the
network, end-user compute, project management, security, with data
center and general network support.

We have IT staff who go out to our locations, sitting in the corner of
a hallway, and watching the interactions from our residents, from our
staff members, and from family members with the technology we use.
That way we get a lift in the use and simplicity of the technology
that we're deploying.

Isaac Sacolick: When you're trying to solicit lots of ideas from the
organization, particularly in transformations where it is a bottom-up
exercise to hear ideas from people that are interacting with
customers, you need a place to capture those. You need a place to vet
those. You need to find exactly who is going to be impacted by things.
I like the investment in a PMO to be able to manage those.

The other part of this is letting IT go and experience what the
end-users are doing. So much of what IT has experienced in the past
has been filtered through other people and systems and texts, sensors,
[and] service desk tickets. To go and live the life of an end user is
so important for them to think through not just what's being asked of
them, but how it's going to impact them and why it's important. That
creates smart implementations when they're ready for it.

What about speed?

Isaac Sacolick: We need to turn new ideas into implementations in
three, six months. Some of the fastest organizations are taking
applications that they're doing today and doing daily changes to it,
testing these things, and doing A/B studies like marketers do. I think
CIOs need to have that in their toolkit and be able to think through
how to execute faster.

Christopher Houser: IT leadership is becoming proficient in all
aspects of the business, whether it's marketing, whether it's HR,
whether it's legal, whether it's advertising, whether it's the medical
side. You have to become knowledgeable on how to apply that technology
to get those wins and put game changers, from an IT standpoint, into
the business so that you get future growth, you get further merger and
acquisitions, scalability and flexibility but, at the same time,
keeping it easy and simple.

Typically, it's through research. It's peers, other CIOs across the
industry, in other industries as well and, in my background, I've been
in several different verticals within IT and in leadership, so
transportation, retail, insurance, and so bringing that background,
some of that background, that experience within healthcare. IT is IT,
but how you solve those problems, I think you can bring experience and
expertise. You can apply those and get wins in other verticals as
well.

Isaac Sacolick: So much of that learning has a direct correlation to
things in other industries. You have to invest the time to learn what
other people are doing.

How do you think about the alignment between IT and the business?

Christopher Houser: Frequently in the past, IT would go off and build
solutions, build systems half-baked or what was perceived as
half-baked, come back to the business and say, "This is what we
thought we heard," and deliver on what wasn't supposed to be or what
was not intended to be the outcome. Delivering half-baked solutions
and then having to go back and rework the complete solution. Time,
money, and resources add up, so having the business a part of that
journey or through those conversations, through the selection process,
through the requirement process, through the build process, and those
iterations are definitely needed and required.

Isaac Sacolick: Christopher, let's put that to a practical example.
You've been in the organization for a few months. You've done some new
rollouts. You're looking at new platforms. How do you make it into a
business-aligned project and not just an IT project?

Christopher Houser: I think a great example of that is one we're going
through right now, and that's our EMR. We're going through and doing
an EMR refresh. In the past life when we built the current EMR, it was
built in-house. We had flexibility -- kind of an open source solution.
We took business requirements of the business to build this EMR.

Now that it's five, six years later, maintaining, updating, creating,
the flexibility there was that we could build whatever we wanted.
However, we weren't keeping pace with the industry. We had a lot of
shortcomings--good, bad, or indifferent--because we were focused on
things that were impacting to us, not necessarily the industry.

As we look for this new solution, instead of IT coming to the table
saying, "Hey, this is the solution," we have a task force or committee
from different business units. Everything from monthly meetings to
reoccurring weekly meetings, and then having the vendors come in
through an RFP process. We've had two or three vendors come in to give
us that review, and the business was in all those meetings from those
departments and groups.

Isaac Sacolick: Yeah, so a couple of things there worth reflecting on.
Number one, this idea of taking something that was built in a
proprietary way three, five, seven years ago. A lot of businesses find
that no longer makes sense, that there are platforms that are
extendible, that are more feature rich and more industry standard,
that are plugged into ecosystems and things like that are really what
they're looking for. Partnering with the business on a selection
process, bringing vendors in, and doing this collaboratively and
together is so important, particularly when looking at key platforms
that are running the business.

Christopher Houser: The business has to see value in IT. In the past,
IT was thought of as an operational organization, meaning make sure
the servers are up in the data center. Make sure the applications are
up and running. We don't have downtime. We're meeting five nines.

If that's all I came back to the business in today's environment, I
would be surpassed. I've got to come back and bring my team, the
collective team, and bring solutions for the future. What are we going
to do to solve real business problems? I think that, with that, the
business wants you to execute and deliver when you come at those
solutions, so you've got to come with trust, and you've got to come
with being able to get things done in those moments of time.