Max Jones, Managing Partner for Health at Agilisys, details why he thinks 2022 will finally be the year of the CIO – and recommends five steps CIOs can take to make this prediction come true.
Following a challenging year for us all (both in a work and a personal capacity), I believe 2022 could finally be the year that health sector CIOs come out from behind their data centres and gain the parity of esteem which they deserve in the boardroom.
Many CIOs have been understandably focussed on tactical programmes to shore up their ageing infrastructure and tools. Over the last five years, they have been supporting their CFOs to divert scarce funds to frontline business priorities, and in the case of the public sector, deliver essential services. However, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the value and quality of data in driving both innovation and action has been clearly demonstrated.
Whether it has been the informing of national policies on COVID-19 or the prioritisation of health services to target the most needy, or the adoption of remote consultation technologies, the digital transformation agenda has a rapidly rising value in the boards of many organisations. Now is therefore the time for CIOs to demonstrate their board credentials, and here are five areas I’d recommend considering.
Be deliberate in the way that you deliver your digital programmes
A lot of CIOs have a large mix of business demands to meet: ageing infrastructure, too many vacancies, sub-scale teams, insufficient funding to innovate at scale and a technical debt which consumes enormous of amounts of the scarce resources available.
To tackle this, CIOs need to consciously consider how to deploy their resources. They should decide which programmes they run through in-house teams (Build), which services they outsource (Buy), which they co-deliver (Partner), and perhaps most importantly which they cease doing (Stop).
Leverage your existing investments
The widescale adoption of digital tools has allowed many organisations to continue to deliver services to their staff and customers in a remote setting. However, this has come at a cost. To make way for this rapid investment, many programmes have been stopped and many implementations were rushed to achieve a specific limited set of business needs.
It is essential that a CIO examine how these implementations can be enhanced and leveraged to make the most of the already made investments. Build on what you already have but go back and implement the governance and collaboration layers which may have been rushed in the first implementations.
Prioritise a pro-active data-driven culture for your organisation
Getting the right information into the hands of the right person at the right time to make the very best decision is at the heart of most process transformation programmes, yet all too often our data and insight teams are focussed on retrospective reporting and situational awareness business intelligence (BI) programmes.
Accordingly, the efforts of our BI functions are frequently seen as irrelevant to the transformation agenda. A CIO needs to quickly change this. This is not rocket science and the technology really is not the limiting factor. Rather, CIOs need to insert themselves (and the power of data to drive transformation) into the boardroom conversation about business transformation.
Design for secure collaboration
Businesses are rapidly changing shape with legacy boundaries becoming blurred and teams of people coming together to make decisions with the ‘citizen at the centre’.
It’s important for a CIO not only enable collaboration, but that they maintain control of their organisation’s data assets to comply with relevant legislation (e.g. GDPR). Luckily, tools exist to enable this both within a single organisation and across a system. A good starting point to enable a collaboration agenda would be to develop an architecture for secure collaboration covering technology, governance and audit.
Build your automation centre of excellence
CIOs know all too well that their success rests largely on the quality of their teams (and partners) around them.
The war for talent is currently ferocious and recruiting enough high-quality staff is a serious issue. Add to this the unparalleled absence levels driven by COVID-19, and many of these issues have at their root the problem of supply and demand for scarce skilled staff. Yet all too often we see existing scarce resources (e.g. nurses) undertaking dull low-value administrative tasks which are simply unnecessary in today’s world.
CIOs need to build momentum around the efficiency agenda so that as many tasks as reasonably possible are automated. Modern tools for intelligent automation and robotic process automation (RPA) are straightforward to deploy and are increasingly delivering benefit at the front line of services (not just for the HR and finance teams). But buying an RPA tool is not enough. CIOs must focus on a sustainable automation function which will continuously drive automation into the business and allow human workers to focus on tasks at the top of their capability grade.