CIO Executive Council —

Not long ago, the idea of IT having any influence over business process change was downright laughable. Of course, the years of disappointing results from enterprise IT projects that resulted were anything but funny.

Today, it's understood that in order to tackle real transformation, IT needs an intimate knowledge of business processes and a hand in operational or business process change. What's more, many organizations now see that IT is uniquely positioned to both picture and perform beneficial changes to the way business is done.

That's why conceiving and executing business process change is an increasingly important experience for up-and-coming IT leaders to get under their belts.

"Having a focus on the whole process is paramount and helps to build the leadership foundation to promote and sustain change," says Heather M. Hartman, director of IS technical services for Care New England Health System and a participant in the CIO Executive Council's Pathways leadership development program.

Several years ago, Hartman was charged with setting up a center for process excellence with IT at industrial automation software and consulting company Invensys Process Systems. "It was to be a catalyst for change and engaging IT with the business," recalls Hartman, who has her MBA, Six Sigma black belt, and a process master certification. "Most of the focus was around IT-related improvements, but [our] view was of the whole process, not just the IT portion."

Hartman learned a lot in that unique role. "Making an IT improvement alone without evaluating the whole business process will only give you short term improvement, if any at all," she says.

It was that big-picture thinking that got Hartman the role overseeing infrastructure at Care New England under then Chief Medical Information Officer and current vice president and CIO Dr. Cedric Priebe III. "He and I discussed the importance of process excellence and how the impact of my work would provide direct benefits to customers—the patients."

In short order, Hartman was applying her process improvement insight not just to IT projects, but to straight-ahead business problems. One of the organization's hospitals desperately needed to cut their transcription and dictation costs or else make some very tough decisions and another was in the market for new transcription and dictation software. But with an initial focus on IT systems alone and no clear consensus on what software to choose, the projects stalled.

The head of health information management asked Hartman for help. "I introduced some key analysis tools and approaches to objectively evaluate the systems," says Hartman. Before long, Hartman was heading up what was now a business process transformation project for one hospital , not a simple RFP for new software. "We analyzed not only the IT systems and services, but the end-to-end process," Hartman explains. She held meetings to create process maps, benchmarked the existing processes against best practices, and identified opportunities for change and what the impact of those changes would be.

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