Trusted Advisor: Key to Technology Project Success

 

If your hospital is undertaking a major information technology project, get a trusted advisor to help you navigate the complexities -- someone who is impartial, has no political axe to grind, and has the skills to conceive and architect a system that'll work for your hospital. A trusted advisor will be hard to find, but will pay for themselves ten times over.

Among the important traits a trusted advisor brings are:

 

1. Demonstrable comprehension of your hospital operations. They don't have to be a doctor or a nurse. In fact, deep clinical skills can often be an impediment to your endeavor.
2. An understanding of how enterprise software works. Can she talk to the IT people? You're not looking for a 'geek', but a technology executive, a person who knows what it takes to build a system at the detail level.
3. A strong decision-maker. You don't want someone who consistently delivers a menu of choices and asks you to choose one. The trusted advisor is a person who can summarize assumptions, validate them, and make a decision. This is a person who can keep hospital executives informed, but not drag them into decisions where they lack expertise and shouldn't be the dominant voice.
4. The great communicator. Making decisions is the easy part; the hard part is selling them to the staff. The trusted advisor must have excellent communications skills.
5. Has vision. Too often technology is deployed to satisfy today's requirements, which isn't good enough. The healthcare business is highly dynamic and adaptive, so the trusted advisor should be able to foresee the future in order to devise a system that can support future requirements. They should be a 'visionary' who can balance today's reality with many future scenarios and still control the project economics.
6. Trustworthiness. The skill set already described here is important, but the hospital executive must be able to trust the advisor with his professional life and the often-huge investment the hospital is making. Beyond the 'gut-feel' of establishing trust, here are three questions to ask yourself when seeking a trustworthy advisor.

 

1. Do you look forward to spending time with this person? You're not looking for a friend, but you must be able to talk to this person informally.
2. Does this person command respect?
3. Does this person understand your risk profile? Your advisor should know YOUR limits instinctively.

 

 

Once you find your trusted advisor, listen to his advice!