OCIO names three directors, outlines first 100 daysby George SpainCCIT Technical Publisher Frank C. Clark, Ph.D., filled three staff vacancies in the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), and all three will be on board by April 12. Clark, MUSC's CIO, said John Dell, Kurt Nendorf and Dave Northrup will join Melissa Forinash as directors in the OCIO. The position of director for academic and research will be filled soon. Frank Starmer, Ph.D., associate provost for information technology, serves in that role temporarily. Dell and Northrup formerly held the positions of director of application development and director of health care computing services, respectively, at MUSC’s Center for Computing and Information Technology (CCIT). Both were employees of Quovadx Inc., which holds the outsourcing contract for information technology (IT) services at MUSC. Dell joined the OCIO March 4, while Northrup officially begins April 1. Nendorf, who was chosen as director of infrastructure, holds the same title at Parkland Health and Hospital Systems in Dallas, Texas. Forinash serves as controller, a position she's held since the beginning of the fiscal year. Clark said his plans for the team’s first 100 days involve initiating an enterprisewide IT assessment mission, then spending the next two months comparing notes and ideas to establish a well-integrated and coordinated IT service model and organization. “We need to be more cost-effective in how we select, deploy, and support information technologies across the enterprise,” Clark said. “We should be more cognizant of the total cost of ownership of technology. We tend to focus on the one-time cost and disregard the ongoing costs of support and maintenance. “MUSC should have an integrated and coordinated IT strategy that supports creating, preserving, transferring, and applying information as we work to improve the health of the community we serve.” Forging an IT strategy will be one of the tasks that the OCIO will tackle. The team will also look at sustainable IT funding strategies and life-cycle budgeting for IT across the Medical Center. “All of this will take longer than 100 days, but we’ve already completed some of the preliminary work,” Clark said. “Currently, various support groups around the hospital and university are responsible for different IT resources and support services. Sometimes this leads to gaps, ambiguities, and often to duplication of services.” Once the team has a full inventory of systems, services, and infrastructure projects, it can reorganize and coordinate the service model to fill gaps and eliminate duplication. “Dave will coordinate and facilitate all clinical IT activities. John will coordinate all financial/administrative systems and services across the hospital, the university, and UMA. Kurt will be responsible for coordinating all infrastructural needs. Melissa will track the cost of hardware, software, maintenance, vendor contracts, and other IT-related expenses to lower costs while meeting expanding service requests. The director for academic and research will play a similar role,” Clark said. It’s not a coincidence that many of the new directors have strong business and customer-focused backgrounds. “A big part of their jobs will be to build strong business relationships with their customers,” Clark said. “When we get a better understanding of our enterprise's IT needs—infrastructure, financial/administrative systems, clinical, and research and education—we’ll be able to determine if we have the right people in the right seats on the IT bus. “CCIT staffing will be re-aligned to serve the five OCIO areas: finance/administration, health care/clinical, infrastructure, academic/research, and controller,” he said. “We will develop an IT strategy in a systematic and ecological fashion. The strategy should be open and diverse, yet flexible enough to adapt to the needs of the MUSC enterprise.” Friday, April 2, 2004
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