Category Archives: CIO Focus

Big Data, CIO Focus, Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Mobile

CIO Focus Interview: David Chou

CIO focus interviewThis is the fourth installment of our CIO Focus Interview series. This time, I spoke with David Chou, the CIO of a large academic medical center. A recognized thought leader, David is on the Huffington Post’s 2015 list of the top 100 most social CIOs on Twitter, and I would definitely recommend following him. Enjoy!

 

Ben: Could you give us some background on your IT experience?

David: I was fortunate to be put on the IT fast track. I was your typical college student getting a BA in Computer Science, and somehow I landed an analyst job at a small community hospital in LA. This allowed me to get the opportunity to really understand the health care industry from an operational standpoint. From there, I focused on understanding operations and then finding the right technologies to fit in. I took the opposite approach than most IT professionals do. I dug deep into the operations model and then figured out which technologies worked well and matched them. That approach led to me getting exposure up the food chain that opened some doors for me. One thing I realized when talking to my counterparts who are successful is that you have to grasp opportunities, even if it means disrupting other aspects of your life.

 

Ben: What is your job like now?

David: Currently, I work at a large academic medical center. In bigger medical centers, there are typically CIOs across all three verticals – healthcare, research, and higher education. Oftentimes, this causes tension and barriers in terms of adoption. In my position, I have control over all three, which is a pretty unique model to have. In addition, we are a public center which also makes us unique in how we operate.

 

Ben: What are your main responsibilities?

David: Today, I manage day to day operations and an $82 million budget. Early in my career the CIO operated transactional data entry, maintaining mainframes, etc. Now it’s a lot more strategic. Technology should be at the core of every organization. The CIO has to be involved strategically. This means being a part of the executive team and having a seat at the table.

{Follow David on Twitter @dchou1107}

Ben: What areas of IT do you think are having the biggest impact on the industry?

David: Right now the focus is on the “4 pillars” of cloud, mobile, social and big data. Any executive that doesn’t have that vision is not going to be well off in the future. These are extremely important and strategic to me. I am trying to get the organization to adopt the cloud. Organizational culture plays a big role in this. Cloud can be an uncomfortable topic so that’s a barrier. I’m challenging that traditional mindset.

Mobile is also very big for us. Consumers in healthcare want to have personalized medicine. They want to shop for healthcare the same way they shop on Amazon. That’s where I believe healthcare is moving towards – a retail model. Whoever successfully pulls that off first is going to cause a huge disruption. We’re all trying to figure out how to utilize it. We want to be able to predict outcomes and provide the best customer experience possible.

I really believe in the importance of social media and the value of capturing consumer engagement and behavior. In my vertical, it has not been widely adopted yet. The big focus has been on cloud, mobile and big data.

 

Ben: How are you incorporating those technologies in your organization?

David: We’re in the process of incorporating a hybrid cloud model in our environment. From a budgetary and contractual perspective we’re all ready to go, we’re just getting the organization’s terms and conditions aligned with the cloud  providers. It’s a challenge for us to get public cloud providers to agree to our terms and conditions.

Our Electronic Medical Record system went live a year ago. Four years ago we had disparate systems that took a lot of manual upkeep. The first step to remedying this was moving from manual to digital. Now that we have that new format, we can take a controlled approach. We’ll look into some consumer friendly products that allow users to have access to data and have self-serving and provisioning capabilities. After this is implemented for a year, my goal is to take another look. We’ll have what we need to solve 80% of problems, so the question will be whether or not that extra 20% is worth a full blown BI platform for analytics?

 

Ben: What advice do you have for other CIOs starting out in the healthcare industry?

David: Take the time to build that relationship with the business. Learn the terms and lingo. Talking tech won’t work with most business executives so you need to adapt. Ultimately, you need to focus on understanding the needs of the customer and solving those needs.

 

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By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

CIO Focus, Cloud computing, Featured

CIO Focus Interview: Stuart Appley, Shorenstein

We’re starting a new CIO Focus Interview Series on the blog to get insights from some of the top thought leaders in the industry. For our first interview, I spoke with Stuart Appley, CIO at San Francisco based Shorenstein, to pick his brain about the current and future IT landscape. You can hear more from Stuart on Twitter.

CIO Focus Interview: Main Challenges

 

CIO Focus Interview: Stuart AppleyBen: Could you give me a little background on your company as well as your role as CIO within the organization?

Stuart: Shorenstein is a real estate investment firm and owner and operators of commercial properties. Essentially, we act like a private equity firm by raising money from high net worth individuals. Instead of buying a company, we buy commercial buildings. We buy them and own and operate them for 10-15 years before selling them off and closing the fund. When we buy a building we typically manage it, so the other part of the business is being a property manager, investing in the property, doing redevelopment, etc. As CIO, I’m responsible for running the IT shop and IT’s long term strategic vision

Ben: What sort of unique challenges do you face as the CIO at your organization?

Stuart: A main challenge we face is that the company culture is a little older. This is something we are actively trying to change. We also have a diverse set of workers and a very distributed, mobile workforce. We have leasing agents out in the field, engineers checking equipment on the go, etc. Supporting the needs of this workforce is a challenge. I would say some of our users may not be as tech savvy as they are in other industries. We tend to hire a lot of senior level people, so our age base is a little higher than other companies. This makes it more difficult to get people to adopt technologies and bring them up to speed.

 

CIO Focus Interview: A look back at 2014

 

Ben: What was your main accomplishment in 2014 from an IT perspective?

Stuart: We just completed a large cloud ERP project. Doing this has allowed us to reduce a lot of application sets. This was a huge accomplishment because of the large amount of data and apps we have been moving in the cloud. Overall, the project, which lasted a little over a year, went smoothly.

Ben: How long have you been utilizing the cloud?

Stuart: 4-5 years, maybe even a little longer. Right now, we have 70% of our applications in the cloud. This includes LOBs apps that are standard, like Salesforce, and industry specific ones like Intralinks.

Ben: Did you have any pushback from the CEO, CFO or board of directors when you made the pitch to go cloud?

Stuart: No, it really wasn’t an issue with them. I was able to make the case that we should outsource things that we do not have a core competency in, and they were completely on board. Buy vs. Build.

 

CIO Focus Interview: Looking Ahead

 

Ben: What are you looking to accomplish in 2015?

Stuart: A main focus of ours is to rationalize cloud storage. We have a lot of content management systems right now – about 5-6. It’s time to rationalize that and get it down to 1-2. Another big focus we have is leveraging the beginning of a digital strategy we have been creating. For example, there are a lot of documents that need to be manually signed. We want to automate the signing of documents to save time and increase efficiency.

Ben: Anything else?

Stuart: We’re also going to review our data center and determine whether we want to move things to public clouds or private. We have listed out apps and services and plan to determine where each one would be the best fit. Finally, I want to continue to focus on mobility and try to push ease of access anywhere, anytime.

Ben: Throughout your career, what concept or technology would you say has had the most drastic impact on IT?

Stuart: I would say the idea of the consumerization of IT. This concept has transformed the whole industry. Users go home and use consumer apps and then carry those same expectations into the work place. In their mind, that ease of access should be available anywhere and everywhere across the board. To me, it’s a great thing for IT because it is forcing us to deliver. We have higher expectations and have a high bar to match.

Ben: How do you view IT?

Stuart: IT needs to be an advisor to the business. There is a lot of innovation that is happening with cloud vendors and we shouldn’t try to match that. The challenge is helping users understand that we support them going out and looking at other options. At the same time, we want them to come to us so we can let them know if there are any security concerns or if it will need to integrate with other apps that already exist in the environment. We need to be a consultant to the business and not a centralized just-say-no organization.

 

Are you a CIO/CTO interested in participating in our CIO Focus Interview series? Email me at bstephenson@greenpages.com

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist