The confidence your leaders and other stakeholders have in your organization’s IT infrastructure strategy can influence decisions about the value of your team and the resources you’re allocated. Ensure your organization’s healthcare IT foundation is in order as it is critical to the efficiency, security, and value of your infrastructure investments.
Your leadership team should understand the following to be true about your organization as they offer insight into your strategy’s rationale and comprehensiveness:
Industry best practices inform your team’s actions. Articulate how and why ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) practices are followed to manage your request, incident, and change management processes according to a proven methodology. Why? Because:
- ITIL supports overall efficiency, security, and system performance. But, most importantly, it helps ensure interoperable systems and interfaces, which is critical in the healthcare setting.
- ITIL is supported by formal professional certifications - to develop current staff and for use as a required core competency when recruiting for the future.
- Since meaningful use of ITIL, you can point to improvements in the overall efficiency, security, and performance of your team and assets.
Information protection is a top priority. Inform leaders on how the team provides an appropriate balance of preventative and detective controls commiserate with your risk appetite to protect your systems and data. Backup and recovery, logging and monitoring, MFA, etc., these are all table stakes; automation, autonomous penetration testing, immutable backups and advanced threat detection solutions are just a few examples of what should be on your radar if they aren’t already. If you haven’t been asked about how quickly your organization could recover from ransomware, be prepared with a factual response (that you can demonstrate).
IT infrastructure resources are optimized. Be able to articulate how your team proactively manages all internal and external resources to ensure they are not only properly protected and secured, but also cost effective. Describe the processes in place to determine how to limit or reduce spend through right sizing of your environment, automating to scale effectively, or involving assistance with staffing needs to optimize IT performance through peaks and valleys.
Your team is highly qualified – with the credentials to prove it. Provide an overview of the engineering and architectural credentials of your team and their experience with the infrastructure technologies in use at your organization. Ensure fellow leaders understand certifications/skillsets are necessary for high performing IT operations (applications, platforms, hardware, devices, etc.). Other priorities for your team are related to maintaining knowledge, addressing talent retention planning and attrition risks, and managing the organization’s surges in demand for support.
Innovation strategies. New or expanded solutions, increased number of devices or users, and growth in services can all require changes to the infrastructure. If the network design is inadequate, virtual machines are not managed, or software is not compliant with the latest updates, and user experience is compromised. Innovation requires additional focus on lifecycle management of hardware, software, and storage solutions. A technology refresh cycle should be defined, supported, and aligned with new initiatives, as well as software patches and maintenance procedures. Automation is employed for repetitive tasks to keep your team focused on strategic imperatives and work that fosters retention and engagement.
Infrastructure management and its impacts on the overall organization can be complicated to explain - especially in healthcare. While your leaders may not fully understand all the intricacies and complicating factors, they can and should understand your rationale and strategy. They should also recognize key indicators of a solid and holistic approach.
Ensuring the resources required to accomplish the infrastructure approach you have determined is best for your organization depends in part on stakeholder confidence. The right insight, reporting, and awareness can help garner the support you need from your organization’s leadership. If your team doesn’t currently have the resources to accomplish these basics, determine other ways to demonstrate the maturity of your infrastructure processes to establish confidence in the strength of your approach.
