An interview with Michael Restuccia, VP and CIO, Penn Medicine, the University of Pennsylvania Health System.
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): How do you keep your IT organization acting and thinking like a team?
Restuccia: Much of Penn Medicine's Corporate Information Services success is based upon its foundation in teamwork. We create that teamwork with consistent communication throughout the organization via multiple channels including quarterly Town Hall communication forums; IS Newsletters, the IS website, IS Neighborhood updates and good old-fashioned departmental team meetings. We also encourage cross-departmental team meeting participation in IS functions such as project intake, architecture review, and project prioritization.
On the more personal side, we also offer IS sponsored social events including celebratory happy hours, attendance at Penn sporting events, ski trips and other similar group activities. There are IS sponsored community benevolent activities including support of the Philabundance food bank, charity runs and walks, holiday adopt-a-family, change-a-life donations, dress-for-success donations and many other benevolent activities. We also follow the principle of no drama in the office.
TEP: Do you try and hire people who will fit in with your organization's culture? Is this a challenge in the tight labor market for IT skills?
Restuccia: The Penn Medicine IS Team has developed and embraced the organizational credo of "Achieving the Most and Inspiring the Best". This credo represents our organization's culture of high energy and positive attitudes. Over time, as the majority of co-workers have fit this model, recruiting and retention of high caliber employees has become much easier. This is due in part to high performing employees wanting to be surrounded with other high performing employees. In addition, the prestige, stability, mission and meaningful work offered at Penn Medicine are contributing drivers to Penn Medicine IS being a destination for high performing employees.
TEP: How do you identify and develop future leaders within the IT space?
Restuccia: Leadership is a focus within our team. About 12 of our group are in management type roles leading the remaining 88 percent of the team. With a high caliber work force, identifying future leaders has become rather easy. For these leaders, Penn Medicine provides basic leadership training. The IS organization has augmented this training through multiple channels. We perform 360-degree leadership evaluations of all IS leaders along with developing plans for improvement in identified areas. We assign each manager a mentor, inside or outside the department, in order to provide professional guidance. We host leadership forums focused on identified qualities of strong leaders and support attendance at industry and professional leadership education seminars.
Since information technology is embedded in virtually every project within the health system, our leaders organically have the opportunity to be exposed and work with representatives of many departments. This exposure creates a better understanding of unique departmental requirements as well as facilitating cross-departmental teamwork across the health system.
Finally, succession planning is performed on both an individual and team level. As a large organization, Penn Medicine encourages its leaders to seek opportunities both within their existing department as well as other departments throughout the organization.
TEP: Tech expertise these days seems to be a moving target. How do you help IT employees cope with the need to constantly update or change their skills?
Restuccia: Although technology is constantly changing, one can argue that no industry more than healthcare requires stability and resiliency. As a result, the selection of durable and reliable technology is paramount to a successful technology platform. To that end, our employees become proficient in these technologies and then incrementally advance as time goes on.
TEP: Any advice you'd pass along to other CIOs on how to handle leadership and team building?
In today's IS environment, it seems improbable for a CIO to be expert in all the areas of responsibility such as application implementations, privacy/security, infrastructure services, business intelligence, project management, application development, data center, cloud, regulatory requirements and so on. So focus your time on recruiting the right caliber employees and building a culture of success that includes working hard and playing hard.
