Mark Lauteren, CIO, University of South Alabama Health System, Chapter 3

When Mark Lauteren started as CIO at University of South Alabama in the spring of 2013, he had two major goals: facilitate seamless integration of data throughout the system, and improve customer service within IT. Sounds simple, right? Luckily he had one major factor on his side — the organization’s willingness to change. In this interview, Lauteren talks about what it took to clean up a fragmented IS department, the gargantuan effort taking place to create ‘one patient, one record,’ why his team doesn’t ‘just say no,’ and the never-ending chess match CIOs must play to keep data secure. He also discusses what it was like to replace a long-time CIO, the mentors who taught him well, and why he takes time to give back.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* Business continuity planning

* Data housed at the university — “We have to be in lockstep.”

* Learning from Dennis Sato & Rick Warren

* Complexity of the CIO role — “This job is not just about the technology.”

* Staff engagement — “You have to help them understand the tradeoffs.”

* Giving back with Bright Beginnings



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Bold Statements

You can’t just bury your head and hope it doesn’t happen. You just have to be ready for it and try and test your plans and hopefully, they work out right when the time comes.

I was very lucky. I learned from a couple of folks that ran very good shops and really had great relationships with their organization and their people, and hopefully I learned enough from them to run half as good a shop as they did.

They don’t need to know the bits and the bytes and why I want to go to a 10-gig network versus a 1-gig network. They don’t care about that. But they understand, ‘by the way, on this older slower network, your radiology images are going to be slow,’ and they understand that when you’ve got a whole bunch of people sharing that small pipe, it’s going to be slow.

It really helps ground you. Sometimes that we get caught up in how tough things are for us, and then you can see what others may be going through and you realize you don’t have it so bad after all.

Gamble:  That brings me to another kind of disaster — the one you can’t help, and form where you’re located, have you had to deal with any business continuity issues or any natural disasters? Or if not, do you have good plans and place for that?

Lauteren:  I personally haven’t here yet. Mobile has been hit. I think the last one was Hurricane Ivan — I believe it was a little over 10 years ago, maybe more — that hit Mobile directly. Obviously, anytime a hurricane hits the Gulf Coast, it’s a challenge to the organization. We do have a DR plan. We’ve got a very strong data center that’s based out on campus and backups of those, as well as facility backups. So we’ve got multiple data centers that our data are spread and replicated across. We believe that, like anything else, it’s only as good as the next time it happens, but we believe that we’re ready for that. We can only test and test and retest until hopefully it’s all working right when it actually happens — hopefully it doesn’t. But what people here tell me is every 10 to 15 years, this area gets hit with a hurricane, some stronger than others, so it’s not a matter of if. In those kinds of situations, you can’t just bury your head and hope it doesn’t happen. You just have to be ready for it and try and test your plans and hopefully, they work out right when the time comes.