Q&A with CIO Nicholas Szymanski, Part 2: “My Role Is to Get People on Board.”

So much of what IT organizations do – what leaders do to help remove barriers – is about processes. In fact, it’s second nature for IT folks to look at things in a consequential matter. Much of troubleshooting is rooted in knowing what steps to take to remedy a certain situation.

“Everything we do is a process,” says Nicholas Szymanski, who recently took on the CIO role at Richmond University Medical Center. That mindset enables teams to break a problem down, take a step back, and ask why it’s happening.

It’s a philosophy that has served him well, both with his current organization and in past lives. But it can’t happen unless leadership has established a rapport with individuals at all levels, and built trust. In this interview, Szymanski talks about how his team is working toward the ultimate goal of a unified platform, what they do instead of saying ‘no,’ and why he hates the word ‘interface.’ He also discusses what it was like to be RUMC’s first CIO, the importance of transparency, and why he’ll always be a sponge.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Prioritization challenges

* Avoiding ‘no’ – “We say when and how we can do it.”

* IT as supporter: “Everything we do should tie into where the organization needs to go.”

* CIO’s role as “translator”

* Common misconceptions – “Not everything can be interfaced.”

* Meditech in the hospital, athenahealth in clinical practice

* Understanding the ‘why’



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Bold Statements

I have to be a translator. My job is to explain why it’s happening and what the efficiencies are. I have to be able to communicate, in a straightforward and transparent way, that yes, this is going to set you back, but we’re all in it together.

It helps set the table and set expectations so that people don’t walk away thinking it’s going to do a million things it can’t do. When that happens, you’re just setting everyone up for failure. No one benefits from that.

Our focus isn’t on training as much as getting people to understand the importance of having an appropriate structure for implementations, including buy-in and governance.

If you have those ingredients, the team will get behind things. They become invested, which leads to a higher-producing team. You’re producing more, you’re producing better quality, and more importantly, those people feel a sense of pride, a sense of ownership. They’re in it.

Gamble:  How do you manage the prioritization piece when there are so many things that need to be tended to?

Szymanski:  I think a lot of places, including us, struggle to pinpoint that prioritization, because IT being a service department gets 20 requests thrown at them daily. And so the first thing is to understand as an organization what is we’re going after — what is our plan? What initiatives should take priority? Anything that centers around patient care immediately takes priority. From there, it’s managing the mid-level projects that range from three to six months.

That’s where it’s imperative that you have very clear communication with the team, and with other department managers and teams to say, ‘We’re not going to say that we can’t do this. But based on what we have, this is what we can do and how we can do it.’ That’s a phrase I always use with my team: ‘we never say no; we say when and how we can do it.’ It’s all about managing expectations.

Going back to your question about prioritization, everything we do should tie into where the organization needs to go and wants to go. That immediately takes precedence. And again,