The new CIO agenda

Longform
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8 December 2015

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The CISO or equivalent should set the policy, but you have the argument about whether it is function or a rank. For the most part right now I think the CISO role is in fact still just a line in the contract of the senior ICT manager. It’s certainly in my remit, Ken Kennedy, Sisk

“We are trying to take everybody on that journey and I believe that we should not have technology-led projects. They should be led by clinicians or patients. That is a big element of what we are trying to do in the next five years, moving from running projects to facilitating the delivery of projects. We aim to move from being a technology centre of excellence to being one for business change. But at the same time we need to show and prove that technology is worth investing in, because the level of ICT investment in Irish healthcare is unbelievably low — it is about 0.8% of the healthcare budget as against a general level of 3% internationally. That’s part of the CIO role, in my view — selling what technology can do, perhaps particularly in health.

Open to innovation
He believes in being open to innovation, not just from the established tech giants but also “the guy around the corner who has just come up with a cool idea. It’s vitally important that we facilitate innovative start-ups in working with the public sector and we are working with the Innovation Hub and other organisations to achieve that. Open standards, for example, are very important in taking any new technology on board. From an ICT point of view Irish healthcare is no longer regional in nature, so we can adopt new services speedily and safely when decisions are made.”

Corbridge says he no longer talks about ICT in technical terms. “Take eHealth Ireland, our policy and strategy that came out at the end of 2013. It’s a great document but could have any country on the front of it. This year we created what we call our Knowledge and Information Plan, about how we implement the eHealth Ireland strategy. It deliberately takes out the technology, the tin and wires bit, and focusses on information in the health system itself.”

Rank or role
The Sisk Group is perhaps the epitome of the private sector in our current context, one of Ireland’s oldest companies with a current turnover of over €1.1 billion, over 2,000 employees and operations in the UK, Europe and the Middle East. Ken Kennedy has been the group’s head of IT for more than 10 years. “Whatever about what the top ICT job is called, CIO or the many alternatives, or new roles like CDO, what I certainly do see is the inevitable rise of the CISO role or top security responsibility across ICT and every activity in the organisation. Comparatively few organisations are big enough to warrant a full job for that role, so I think the difficulty arises in regard to where it sits. The CISO or equivalent should set the policy, but you have the argument about whether it is function or a rank. For the most part right now I think the CISO role is in fact still just a line in the contract of the senior ICT manager. It’s certainly in my remit.”

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