While some CIOs are forging ahead, others remain reluctant about bringing consumer technologies into the corporation

By Paula Klein, TechWeb

It might be appropriate to call Dr. John Halamka, the CIO at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Doctor Yes. While many CIOs struggle to find the funding, the buy-in, or the perfect timing to introduce emerging technologies to the data center, Halamka is already there. He has a track record of embracing new IT solutions to improve hospital efficiency and patient care and now he adds social networking and Web 2.0 to his toolbox.

Over the past two years, Halamka has converted to electronic records at Beth Israel Deaconess, as well as replacing all his old Unix servers with Linux clusters, running on off-the-shelf machines that achieve higher throughput and lower power consumption. As an IT advocate at the medical center, Halamka continually seeks ways to expand IT services to patients, staff, and the medical community. He believes in getting doctors involved in system design to be sure they use it, which also helps him win support from his executive committee.

Nevertheless, in a January post on his blog-yes, he has his own blog called Geek Doctor, as well as pages on Facebook and LinkedIn, and a Second Life identity-Halamka berated himself for being late to the Web 2.0 party. "I want to admit publicly that I did not embrace Web 2.0 fast enough," he wrote. "At Harvard, we do provide easy-to-use content management for departmental Web sites (not individuals), online document sharing, calendars, news, and forums. We also host dozens of wiki sites. However, we do not provide Web-based IM and we're just starting to deploy social networking." As part of a new strategic planning process, Halamka recommended "an immediate, wholesale adoption of Web 2.0 throughout Harvard Medical School."

On the Fast Track

Fast forward six months. On May 29, Harvard received a $117.5 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) to link together the hospitals and research community. By July 1, Halamka planned to pilot the tools and technologies. "What will we launch on that date? Call it Facebook meets eHarmony for the Harvard community," he wrote.

The medical center is "considered an innovative, early adopter of Web technologies for healthcare," Halamka told Microsoft CIO Network. "Our clinical applications are among the best in the world. However, our internal and external Web sites are just now evolving to embrace social networking technologies."

The current grant should be a big step toward Halamka's goal of deploying social-networking tools more widely. It will "markedly accelerate the adoption of social networking technologies through Harvard Medical School and its hospitals," he says. The CONNECTS portal brings together numerous databases at Harvard-including faculty lists and medical libraries-into a social-networking application. "In the past, doctors and nurses have kept their own records and had their own siloed workflows," he says. "We're revising our clinical systems to be more wiki-like-all caregivers can manage medications, notes, and problem lists together to ensure continuity of care and error-free handoffs among providers."

Halamka says his dean and senior management are "very excited by these new applications and see them as essential for Harvard Medical School and its hospitals to work more seamlessly together. Many users, especially those under the age of 40, are demanding such features," he says.

Adoption Still Lagging

Nevertheless, CIOs like Halamka may still be in the vanguard. A recent survey, sponsored by CDW Corp., and conducted by an independent polling firm, found that 53 percent of 1,060 IT decision makers, across multiple sectors, believe that Web 2.0 tools will substantially improve employee productivity. Among government executives, 68 percent say the tools will be important in attracting and retaining the next-generation of workers, as do 61 percent of corporate IT decision makers.

However, 31 percent of those surveyed worry that Web 2.0 will be used for personal use instead of work. Another 28 percent are concerned about information security, and 27 percent worry about employees wasting time.

Although those issues concern Mary Sobiechowski, CIO and global director of IT at Sudler & Hennessey advertising agency in New York, robust product platforms and tight budgets are seen as greater challenges. Sudler & Hennessey is the healthcare communications division of Y&R Brands, a WPP Group company. So even though she operates in a creative media environment, Sobiechowski says she has to adhere to many of the regulatory and compliance issues that her pharmaceutical industry client's face. She's a fan of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, but initiatives have been limited so far. "We aren't implementing our own social network with clients yet," she says, "because compliance can be difficult."

Internally, her staff is working to offer better user collaboration tools, but "we don't have a full-blown web portal yet." Sobiechowski's wish list includes a single platform that can meet her group's needs for blogs, wikis, project management and digital image-sharing. "We're trying to find what works best. I'm not just jumping in," she says.

At the same time, she's aware of keeping up with competing advertising agencies that may be smaller and more agile. "We don't want to alienate potential talent" from joining the company, nor ignore the preferences of young employees already on board. Sudler's global Facebook site has attracted about a fifth of its employees so far, proving that there's demand for these tools, Sobiechowski says. She hopes to finalize her decision about what technologies to use by August-assuming her IT budget isn't frozen or cut before then. "It's not an easy time," she says.

New Tech, Old Issues

Consultant Bill Ives says he has experienced "many waves of technology adoption" over the years and he sees some of the same issues repeating themselves with Enterprise 2.0 technologies. Ives, who writes and speaks extensively about knowledge management, business blogs and Enterprise 2.0 applications, says that to be successful, businesses have to align emerging technologies with business processes and engage users and IT in designing the systems.

"CIOs can't impose" technologies on users, nor can they just "toss it out and see what happens," says Ives. They need to strike a balance and serve as "facilitators," not someone manning the barricades to keep the tools out.

Social networking tools can encourage open collaboration and transparency, but they won't be used if people think they're being monitored and spied on, Ives says. And while consumer web tools aren't the same as business tools, Ives says that rather than banning their use, CIOs can adopt enterprise versions of mashups, search engines, or social bookmarking to achieve a specific business purpose. "There are great opportunities [for CIOs] to be heroes" and get involved. His advice: "Start with a pilot. Fix a problem. Build success stories and you'll get support from executives and users."

Harvard's Halamka also encourages other CIOs to get started. "Social networking and web-based collaboration are not just hyped new technologies," he says. "They are the reality of how we need to work given the challenges of travel and the need for virtual work teams, which execute projects very rapidly."