LS: It was very interesting. When I spoke with the search firm, which was Korn/Ferry, they acknowledged up front that I had two roles during the process. One role was to actually help shape the job description and what type of candidate we needed. So I was kind of the “right-hand man” if you will, here at the health system, and then the other role was as a candidate. Yes, I made it known early on that I was interested in it and the executive team here was very supportive and encouraged me to apply as well.
AG: Did you feel it was important to tread lightly during your interim CIO phase?
LS: A lot of folks that I’ve known throughout the years have said it’s important to act as if. But you do have to balance that with some business acumen as well because you’re going through a process and you can’t completely ostracize or upset people during that process too. I don’t think that serves you very well.
AG: How could you ostracize someone by acting as if?
LS: Well if you come in very definitive, you know, if you come out of the gate too hard. I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make is that you don’t want to swing the pendulum. You don’t want to say just because I have this acting title, I have to move from being the strategy guy that really is supportive and bringing things to the table, to the opposite end of the table and say, “This is the strategy and this is how we’re going to do it.” You just have to make you don’t swing too far the other way. I did think you have to lean more towards the execution.
Overall I’ve been here for seven years when I took the interim spot. And I have seen and done consulting with the health system for about a year prior to that. And in that whole 10 years, I have seen that there is a huge need for a larger scale, industrial strength, repository of information, because people have a lot of great data sources, but we don’t really have a common platform that helps turn that into knowledge and then into action after that. And you’ve got people looking at different reports, getting different numbers, there’s no consistency in information. So I worked with our chief medical officer and this is just when I was in the interim role, working with Microsoft, to sign a contract with them to become one of their earlier adopters of the Azyxxi product. That was something which strategically had to be put into place. It was a great organizational need. So I worked with the CMO and the executive team to really push that, and we got a large commitment. Usually, we’re a very collaborative organization, which means we can take months to make these types of decisions. But we ended up getting a $10 million commitment from our board to spend over the next five years for that initiative.
AG: How do you think you were able to get things to move quickly with this particular project?
LS: I think it was the fact that we brought it to light very clearly, that it had been and it will continue to be an organizational need. I think that was one piece. I think partnering up very closely with someone on the business side was important, in this case it was the CMO. And then through that partnership, going to the executives and showing how this will support our longer term goals as an organization. At a minimum, this project will support two of our three main long term goals very strongly. So for the two of us, the partnership we took to the executive team to explain the value to the organization was powerful.
AG: Sounds like it was very important to partner with the CMO. We hear this is becoming ever more critical to finding success as a CIO. What are your thoughts?
