Last year CIOs faced budget cuts, project delays and increased demand for services, and this year IT budgets have – for the most part – remained flat. For CIOs, it’s a challenging time, and one that requires them to move from cost-cutting measures to providing strategic value.

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One strategy is increasing the use of information through business intelligence, according to Gartner’s CIO report, “Leading in Times of Transition: The 2010 CIO Agenda.” We’re seeing big shifts as CIOs reshape their infrastructure, moving from traditional IT to IS lite (taking away certain applications and outsourcing them) to lean IT (where they run a core set of applications) and adding value through innovation.

“This is the transition CIOs are thinking about and it’s where BI sits,” said Bill Hostmann, research vice-president with Gartner, during the Information Builders Summit 2010 in Orlando. BI started out with reporting and dashboards, then moved to ad hoc queries and data mining – now it’s moving into predictive analytics.

For CIOs, the value is in moving users toward a self-service model of information delivery, which can lower the total cost of ownership, drive business costs down and provide data to users on a timely basis.

Evolution, not revolution

Cambridge Memorial Hospital (CMH) is one organization that’s taking it slow. BI, after all, is an evolution, not a revolution. “The amount of data is astounding,” said Ed Norwich, CIO of Cambridge Memorial Hospital. “But the amount of immediately usable decision-making data is quite restricted at the present time, so we want to determine which pieces to provide.”

CMH, a large community hospital in Ontario, rolled out an IBI WebFocus BI platform in order to develop an emergency room tracking board for patient flow and care delivery in the ER. Prior to this, they relied on a whiteboard to record patient information and manage loads – which clearly didn’t integrate with the hospital’s electronic management system.

The tracking board provides an overview of each patient, including basic information and whether lab tests have been completed. This is integrated with the Meditech hospital information system so clinical support departments can view the patient load in ER and estimate the resulting workload. It’s also allowed CMH to monitor patient wait times in the ER.

“It’s readily viewable and easily understandable and it tells us when people have been routed through the lab,” said Norwich. “We have all the critical elements we need to make a decision about patient flow, about support, about the management of cases.”

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