The Relevance of IT to the Board

I recently undertook one of the most valuable training courses I've ever been on, here at Microsoft. The course is a three day role playing workshop training you on how to deal with members of the Board - in this case in a sales situation. The role plays are undertaken by ex Financial Directors, CEOs and so forth. The learning form this as you would expect is the judicious application of common sense. But the interesting thing that left me was how little IT is perceived as bringing to a conversation with a Board member.

So with that in mind it was with interest that I read the findings of a survey, published in Health Informatics Journal (vol13,no.2, June 2007 http://jhi.sagepub.com ) The conclusions, drawn from a survey of Health Board members in Australia makes for stark reading for vendors, and those applying to Boards on behalf of IT. Senior Health Executives do not believe there is a compelling business case for IT investment and lack confidence in the IT solutions available to them.

The survey goes into some depth in trying to analyse the various potential inhibitors to IT innovation as perceived by executives. I have pulled out two key elements I think pertinent.

None of them had tangible, reliable measurements of the value IT delivers. This is an understandable reaction, but not an insurmountable one; increasingly you will see references on t h NHS resource centre to the sort of exposure to real, local value that is being realised by successfully run projects. This is needed to convey just how much some of the work that is being done by both local IM&T and partners is offering and achieving. One of the most tangible ways of recording this value comes through Infrastructure Optimisation http://www.microsoft.com/uk/nhs/improving-healthcare/desktop-management/io.mspx - This model is not a model created by the sales community but an analytical set of benchmarks and tools that can plot the value an increasingly mature and sophisticated infrastructure can deliver. Microsoft has taken the model from the likes of Gartner and IDC – and created a set of step by step instructions and best practices that can help realise some of this value quickly and effectively. This is further augmented by a channel of partners versed in the steps required.

Senior executives felt that IT had an unnecessary complexity on people, processes and social situations. This is extremely valid – particularly in the milieu of any Trust with the priorities of running, say, a functioning busy local hospital, and the people that keep it running 24 hours a day. If you then add in the dynamic of a fluid workforce of mobile staff then IT can be seen as adding a layer of complexity to an already complicated situation. I happen to disagree with this view – I’m a firm believer that if IT is implemented with the workforce and in harmony with both the formal and informal structures that keep the workforce informed and educated IT can reduce complexity. It is when organisations ignore what is working well – irrespective of the technology and impose new systems and ways of working upon often fragile social structures that IT becomes an additional burden. However, and I have seen this working – where IT projects embrace the people who will after all have to work with this daily – it can work. That can be as simple as asking for staff to give the new intranet a name to as complex as engaging senior stakeholders from representative areas of the business to contribute and provide input into the design of new systems. IT should support a capable and motivated workforce, and in doing so supports and improves their behaviours and doesn’t restrict or confine them.

It would make for an interesting study to correlate the findings of this survey with the research of a report such as the Keystone Survey, which looked in 2005 in to why IT matters in mid-sized organisations. It too found that IT was a ubiquitous investment “like Electricity”, and that its benefits were easily diffused through the organisation. However where their conclusions differed was in finding that the successful adoption of IT was crucial to the growth of an organisation – where increases in complexity of processes or organisation were encountered those who had grasped IT successfully were able to capitalise quickly and overcome those obstacles. The NHS is moving towards this rise in complexity and a successful model of IT deployment and adoption of both clinical systems and the underlying infrastructure will help those organisations thrive. Perhaps it is then that we might revisit this initial survey and consider whether some of these views may have changed.