Social Business: If You Build It, Will They Come? - Getting Buy-In From the Board
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Premier Healthcare Alliance is jointly owned by 200
hospitals and has affiliations with a total of 2,500 hospitals and 80,000 other
healthcare operations. It handles group contracting for hospital products and
services, shares clinical knowledge among its members and provides a forum in
which members can share their experiences with insurance claims and risks.
In a case study presented at IBM Connect, CTO Denise
Hatzidaki discussed how the organization is a year into its multifaceted
community and analytics project, known as the Integrated Performance Platform,
that will be built out over the next three to five years. The Integrated
Performance Platform has three components: community; applications; and
integrated data. The goals are
to make sense of what Hatzidaki called the “plume of data” that surrounds
clinicians and patients, and tease out relevant insight, information and
intelligence for users. “It’s about how
to make those insights available at the right time at the right place for the
right individuals,” she said.
“You talk to some folks who say ‘I don’t want to give my
[employees] Twitter, how will they get any work done?’ This change isn’t an IT
thing,” said Hatzidaki. “It’s for us to work with business on how to … solve
the business problems we ‘re trying to fix today.”
She added: “The problem is not technology, it’s culture. How
do we enable people to think differently about how we solve [business]
problems?”
Hatzidaki had to get buy-in on the Integrated Performance
Platform from the organization’s board. Winning over the medical establishment’s
leaders required “going very methodically over every proof point. We were very
careful to set milestones and goals. [You have to] talk to the business in the
business’s language: ‘We’re going to enable performance improvement by making
this available to the members.’ You want to show incremental improvements.
Nothing speaks better than incremental data points.”
Working jointly with IBM and technology consulting firm Perficient,
Premier has begun building the community components of its Integrated
Performance Platform. “Our goal is to take this platform and build an ecosystem
for healthcare” that makes it easy for users to communicate, collaborate, share
and analyze data in order to improve outcomes and solve pressing medical
problems, explained Hatzidaki.
IT leaders interviewed by CIO Insight during IBM Connect agree,
though, that the danger in building any social business platform lies in the
“Field of Dreams” belief that “if you build it they will come.”
IBM has some 425,000 employees in 170 countries, along with
another 100,000 or so subcontractors. Horan said her team supports a total of
about 550,000 endpoints. Some 90,000 IBM employees are actively using IBM
Connections, according to Carol Sormilic, VP of global workforce and web
Processes. “Our goal is to get all 425,000 to join,” she said.
Raising awareness, providing education and training, sharing
success stories and finding ways to reward users are just some of the tactics
organizations are using to increase the use of their social business solutions.
“Right now, IT is leading the social business revolution,” said
IBM’s Horan. “The business users have to understand what’s possible. In some
ways it’s very similar to early days of web. If you went to business users back
in 1993 and asked them ‘How would you use a web browser and website?’ they’d
look at you as if you were stupid.”
If social business indeed proves to be as instrumental in
our daily lives as the Web has become, then any CIO willing to bet on pushing
the enterprise into this emerging ecosystem could end up being amply rewarded.
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