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I’ve never met Dr. John D. Hamalka, the CIO of Harvard Medical School,. but from his blog and what I’ve read about him he seems to embody many of the characteristics of a new wave of CIOs that is has emerged in the past few years.
What are the difference between old school IT leaders and the new breed? For starters traditional CIOs generally don’t embrace 2.0 communications tools like blogging. Wouldn’t blog -- no way, no how..
In contrast at least some 2.0 CIOs blog regularly as a means of everything from
getting out information to their staffs and co-workers to exchanging ideas and updating vendors. Hamalka, for instance, produces “Life as a Health Care CIO.” Here he records his “experiences with infrastructure,applications, policies, management, and governance as well as muses on such topics such as reducing our carbon footprint,
standardizing data in healthcare, and living life to its fullest.”
In his blog Navy CIO Rob Carey writes regularly on topics such as use of social media to increase trust and the bright future of the cyber/IT workforce. Ironically, Carey also uses this relatively open forum to inform Department of Navy (DON) personnel
on security issues such as the importance of safeguarding personally identifiable information (PII.)
In “The Effective CIO”, Martin Marietta Materials CIO Chuck Musciono writes every three days – yes, that’s days, not weeks or months -- about a variety of factors relating to IT leadership. Musciono also tweets and seems committed to fully understanding the Web 2.0 tools being used by his constituents at Martin Marietta.
Then, of course, our first Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, blogs as part of the Federal IT Dashboard. Here the purpose seems to be providing an update as to how new federal It initiates such as Data,gov. which is intended increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets, are progressing. This reads more like a press release than a blog. Transparent it isn’t.
Finally, a number of CIOs blog on CIOZone.com on topics as varied as risk management and the disposal of used IT equipment.In the professional network venue the focus is peer-to-peer, and typically the writer can be more candid than he or she might be in a public forum.
The new breed of CIOs is also big on communicating via Blackberry and the like. Hamalka has calculated that in an average day he uses his Blacberry 111 times for 2 hours 24 minutes divided as 86 times for 1 hour 34 minutes during work hours and 25 times for 50 minutes
outside of work hours. An average week: 482 Times for 9 hours 31 minutes divided as 431 times for 7 hours 50 minutes during work hours and 51 times for 1 hour 40 minutes outside of work hours.“This means that I spend approximately 20% of my work time doing Blackberry communications,” he writes.
“A startling statistic.”
Now the old school CIO might well say at this point, “how can he possibly get anything done how much time he spends on the blogs and the Blackberry. Well, it seems to work for Hamalka.Consider that in addition to Harvard. he is also Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Chairman of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network (NEHEN), Chair of the US Healthcare
Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP)/Co-Chair of the HIT Standards Committee.and a practicing Emergency Physician.
And that’s when he’s not living life to the fullest.
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