Joe Bengfort, CIO, UCSF Medical Center and Campus, Chapter 3

Want to know the secret to being CIO at a large academic organization? Fear. “If I wasn’t a little bit worried about being able to deliver what the institution needs, it would mean I’m not paying attention,” says Joe Bengfort. But that, of course, is just part of an equation that also includes a confident knowledge of IT functions, a willingness to engage in the business side, and an ability to apply lean methodologies to situations like consolidating IT departments. In this interview, he talks about UCSF’s clinical enterprise strategy — and the infrastructure required to support it; his team’s “incremental approach” to analytics; the challenge academic organizations face in securing data without stifling creativity; and how he believes the CIO role will continue to evolve.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* Keys to change management — “Move swiftly.”

* “Transparency has everything to do with trust.”

* Working with Ross Perot

* From consultant to CIO — “It scared the hell out of me.”

* “High stakes” at UCSF

* Evolving CIO role — “The infrastructure aspect has to be automatic.”



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Bold Statements

Transparency has everything to do with trust. And even when the news is bad, people need to know. They also need to know that you’re going to be fair and you’re going to give them time to understand the facts and give them the time to make decisions based on facts and not on fear.

Being in a system like UCSF, you’re really inspired by the mission so much. You get exposed to it almost every day and it’s extraordinarily motivating. You just don’t want let these people down because they’re doing such incredible work.

That’s been a challenge to look at these people who are doing these incredible things and say, ‘You have to do these things differently, and here’s how we’re going to do that. I’m going to put some technical controls in place that may drive you crazy and I’m going to work like crazy to get you acclimated to this so it’s second nature. That’s been a very difficult part of the job, but we’re making great progress.’

So much of the innovation is going to happen in the departments with very pointed technologies, and we just need to put people on our staff that can engage in those departments and work with the people that really understand the business. That’s the shift that I’m trying to make.

Gamble:  I can imagine that was challenging in a lot of ways, combining two different IT departments. What was your approach as stepping in now as the CIO of both? That’s such a huge change management situation

Bengfort:  Yeah, I have some advantage in this, in that I grew up in the outsourcing industry. I worked for Ross Perot for many years, and my job was consolidating IT organizations through outsourcing arrangements, some of which were successful and some of which I bumped my head on quite substantially, but learned a great deal.

The biggest thing to this is first to move swiftly. You don’t want this to go on for a long period of time because once people know that we’re consolidating and this is going to be a material change, there is a certain degree of productivity loss that you realize, because people spend a great deal of energy worrying. So you want to get through this with some purpose in terms of speed.

The second thing is that transparency is extraordinarily important and oftentimes hard, because in a consolidation, there’s some good news, but there’s usually some bad news. ‘Oh,