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There are a few keys that I have found when communicating with customers about outages and service interruptions: Our customers can accept bad news, they cannot accept no news. Getting the team out into the patient care areas, communicating face-to-face, buys a lot of goodwill. Don’t use generic email addresses, send genuinely worded emails from […]
Most people think that the role of the Project Management Office (PMO) is similar to that of an airplane pilot. It is their job to make sure that the plane gets to its destination without crashing into the ground. While that’s true, and a critical role of a Project Management Office, it may not be […]
Misunderstandings, even small ones, can result in thousands of hours of wasted work. It is really important in our field that we clearly communicate. One common source of misunderstanding is the pronoun. I would encourage you to listen to how often people use “it”, “that and “them”. I have made it a habit to ask […]
I currently carry a Samsung Infuse Android phone. It is an AT&T phone that I have had for about a year. I am ready to replace it and I have been wrestling between the new Samsung Galaxy SIII and an iPhone. The reviews of the SIII are tempting. The specs are impressive (quad core graphics, […]
The following headline caught my eye as I was reading through my RSS feed: How to deploy ERP in 120 days As soon as I read this headline, I knew I was going to unleash a rant. Caron Carlson wrote this piece, and it is a good story about Johnson & Johnson’s acquisition of a […]
Our first hospital to attest for EHR Incentives is expected to receive $3,173,094 for Stage 1. To qualify for that incentive we spent $381,133. This includes the cost for 5,219 hours of IT time to complete the work. So, it surprised me when I was listening to a CIO discuss Meaningful Use on one of […]
In January I wrote about the importance of using Root Cause Analysis at Ministry Health Care as a way to learn from our mistakes. This process is so important to us that we have an employee (Fred) that oversees Root Cause Analysis and facilitates the meetings. Those meetings are generally calm meetings that take place […]
I used to think about the day when I fixed everything so we would stop IT outages. Of course that is silly. Like other healthcare organizations we are adding applications to the portfolio every year as new solutions address previously underautomated areas. Most of these are not core parts of the IT architecture, but they […]
Somewhere along the way, the word consulting in our field changed. Today, consulting is about finding available freelancers on a just-in-time basis. The “consultant” is nothing more than a recruiter with a billing back office. Some consultants claim they screen the candidates, but there is no way that can be done effectively given the turnaround […]
A couple of years ago, we separated our “technology division” into two groups: IT Engineering and IT Operations. The dividing line between the two is the production environment. Any new technology is architected by our Engineering group before it goes into production. Once something is in production it belongs to IT Operations and it cannot […]
