CIO playbook: Building better relations with boards

Rich Temple has it pretty good. The vice president and CIO of Deborah Heart and Lung Center, in Browns Mills, N.J., has a close relationship with every member of the C-suite and says he is valued by the hospital’s board.

“I feel very blessed that I don’t have the issue of folks not understanding the value of technology,’’ Temple says. “I feel like a valued member of the team and am brought into a lot of strategic discussions.”

That wasn’t always the case, he adds. Deborah is a small hospital and Temple is the first CIO. Before he arrived over five years ago, “There was a director-level person running IT and there was a sense [the board] wanted someone who could think more strategically about using technology in a way to positively impact the business,” he says.

Deborah Heart and Lung Center

And that is what Temple does. He typically presents to the roughly 14-member board about three times a year and says that “not many projects get too far out of the starting gate” without his input.