When Susan Ibanez took on the role of CIO at Southeast Georgia Health System, there wasn’t a predecessor to hand over the playbook – because there wasn’t a predecessor. There wasn’t exactly a playbook either – at least, not the type Ibanez had become accustomed to during her healthcare leadership career.
What she did have, however, was a strong team that was poised to move forward and willing to learn.
During a recent Keynote interview, Ibanez shared insights on how she is navigating the new position and guiding the development of a new strategic roadmap. She also talked about the challenges of ownership when it comes to disaster recovery planning, and how she’s giving back.
Susan Ibanez
Perhaps the most important skill an inaugural CIO needs is patience, and along with that, a realization that your plans may need to be shelved. “I had built out governance and processes, but I had to take a step back from that and start at the grassroots level,” she said. “Why do they need a CIO? What was the difference was it gonna make? Before we could start talking about that, we had to go back a bit further.
And so, not only did she conduct her own 100-day assessments and SWOT analyses, but she asked leaders from different departments such as network infrastructure, applications, and data security, to do the same. Then, “we put them all together and developed a roadmap” to identify the most pressing priorities. “We’re trying to balance the clinician-patient experience and ensure we have a highly reliable organization.”
The low-hanging fruit, they determined, were tasks like WiFi remediation, replacing the core switch and firewalls, and putting in a new virtual infrastructure. “While a lot of organizations have the good fortune to be able to focus strictly on digital transformation, we’ve had to run parallel tracks of eliminating technical debt and getting a lot of that foundational piece place,” Ibanez noted. “And at the same time, keep up with what we need to do from a digital perspective. It’s really challenging.”
What made it even more daunting for Southeast Georgia was the absence of a C-suite representative. “There was an organizational strategic plan before I got there, but the IT department wasn’t connected to it,” she noted, which meant they often received secondhand information about IT decisions.
As a CIO, “you have that seat at the table. You can have input into the strategic plan, share that communication and build an IT strategic plan that aligns,” Ibanez added. “Because if it doesn't align with the strategic initiatives and plan of the organization, you shouldn't be doing it.”
Another consequence of not having IT leadership? A lack of direction when it comes to disaster planning and business continuity, which weren’t priorities before her arrival. “Those are new concepts to this organization, but by no fault of their own,” she added. “They didn’t have the rigor or structure in place.”
Consequently, one of her team’s key objectives has been building that out by going through cybersecurity tabletop exercises, doing application inventory, and looking at application rationalization.
The other part of that involves getting together with operational owners and asking some very simple questions: in the event of a downtime, what needs to come back up first? What’s your order of operation? And at a more basic level, does your team have downtime processes and procedures?”
The answer isn’t always yes. In fact, “in many organizations there’s an assumption that if it runs on a computer, it's an IT issue,” she noted. And although that’s true in some respects, she encourages leaders to flip the script. “Operations belongs to operations, and so they need to make sure their teams are clear on what to do in a downtime and who’s responsible for what.”
The more information individual departments can provide about downtime procedures, the more effectively IT can do its job to restore services.
Those discussions can be transformative, noted Ibanez. In her experience, they were “eye-opening,” particularly since the default response in many cases seemed to be ‘refer to IT policy,’ Ibanez recalled. “I said, ‘no, you need to stop and think about what your process is. I can tell you what IT is going to do.’ And they were like, ‘okay, that makes sense,’ and they’ve been very thoughtful in putting those together. It’s just a completely new conversation.”
And although that aspect of the role has been extremely fulfilling for Ibanez, her true passion is in helping to educate and advance the next generation of healthcare IT leaders. “It’s really exciting,” she said of her side-gig teaching informatics at Abilene Christian. “I get so energized working with students. I believe we as leaders have an obligation to give back, and this is a way to do that.”
What many students seek is guidance – either on how to achieve their career aspirations, or what field they should pursue. “Some of them don’t know what they want to do. The opportunity I have is to tell them what healthcare and healthcare leadership look like now, and to make sure they know they have options,” she noted. “I ask them, ‘what’s your passion?’ Do you want to work in a health system? In a clinician’s practice?’ I start to lay out the options because sometimes they think, ‘I can only do IT.’” But, as she often reminds people, “if you’re doing IT in healthcare, you’re doing healthcare, and you’re fortunate enough to do it with a technology foundation.”
In her mentoring role, Ibanez encourages students – and anyone in IT, for that matter – to figure out what motivates them and take steps in that direction.
“I wanted to be a clinician, but that’s not my gift,” she noted. “So I got into healthcare the only way I could, which was through technology.”
The technical aspect, she has found, is only part of the equation.
“It’s not just a techie job anymore. A CIO, in my opinion, is a business owner, an operational leader, and a strategy person,” she noted. “You have to understand finance. You have to understand vendor management and contract negotiation, all of it.”
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