CIO Talk Radio Blog

The healthcare industry has a history of relatively low-tech solutions, and patient care has been predominantly manual for a long time, but pressure has mounted for change.  A principal source of this pressure has been government-initiated reform.  Built into reform legislation is a system of incentives and penalties that could work to promote the adoption of cloud technologies aimed at healthcare cost containment.  Healthcare organizations are entering this new world absent exemplary bravery, but their timidity is not groundless.  Cloud technologies could indeed yield significant cost savings, but it is feared they will come at the unacceptable expense of security and privacy imperatives. Yet there are countervailing forces.  The sheer intensity of competition in healthcare delivery rewards speed.  Those quickest to adopt the latest technologies—as long as they are adopted on sound business principles rather than for being new and flashy--will win out as reform, with its rewards and punishments, encourages aggressiveness.

John Goodman (author of Strategic Customer Service, Co-founder Tarp Worldwide) estimates that only one in ten companies provides the kind of IT-informed support for lasting retention of customers.   He claims that almost 50% of companies are lulled into the unverified belief that good support obtains due to the fact that the company gathers its general impression from the small number of aggrieved customers that call.  However, it is just the case that only about 10% of customers are sufficiently motivated to act on their complaints.   Additionally, 50% of companies, says Goodman, view customer service almost exclusively as a cost to be minimized.  In other words, there is nothing like widespread enlightenment on the positive relationship between good support and the bottom line.

A quote famously attributed to Politian Tip O’Neil states, “All politics is local.” Something similar could be said of global privacy and intellectual property laws. In Europe the individual owns his or her own information, which cannot “leave” Europe, while in the US, any information gleaned from public records on the Internet belongs to whoever collects it, who is then free to sell it to anyone.  So while US citizens enthusiastically register for “do not call” lists and diligently delete cookies, marketers, debt collectors, investigators, and the nosy can buy publically available information on whomsoever they want. In the US, intellectual property and the income stream from it lives on indefinitely, while in Europe, intellectual property such as a public performance, automatically becomes public domain after 50 years. In Europe privacy issues have been raised over Google’s Street View application. The service is banned in Austria (although a Romanian company has a similar application in use in Austria).

Just how alien is the business side of an organization to the IT workers running things, and vice versa? Traditionally we think of IT guys as geeks who are focused on their own narrow little world. Still, any worker could help watch to see that little things which might have slipped by someone on the business side are caught before they create a problem. But is it reasonable to expect those same  IT workers, who are often heavily involved in tasks strategic to running the business, and who may need to focus fully on the IT tasks at hand, to also keep an eye on customers, competitors, and the business environment, as if they were the guys wearing the business suits?

Fans are passionate, even obsessive about someone or something…  Some of us are fans of the latest bleeding edge technology.  A salesman, a CEO, an entrepreneur, can all be fans of their business or product.  But are such passions only in the eye of the beholders?