Many years ago, I got a late-afternoon call from the board chairman of the local hospital. A new system had gone live, and it failed badly. Doctors, overwhelmed and distrustful of the system, stopped admitting new patients, creating a financial crisis. External consultants had stabilized the situation and I was asked to join the board to help chart the course of IT moving forward...A root cause analysis told a clear story: the project had been led by the CIO, without clinical leadership at the center. The CEO was known to erupt when given bad news, so little truth ever surfaced. And the doctors and nurses, those closest to the work, were left out of critical decisions that shaped the system’s rollout...That experience was a vivid reminder that major system rollouts don’t fail because of bad technology. They fail because of a bad leadership structure. In today’s Dispatch, we lay out what stakeholder leadership really means for ERP implementations, how these projects must be organized to succeed, and why, despite all the technical complexity, their success ultimately has more to do with people and process than technology.

Episodes

Leadership Lessons from a Hospital EHR Crisis