Q&A with UMCSN CIO Maria Sexton: “IT & the Business are One”

Unless they work for technology companies, CIOs aren’t technology executives, according to Maria Sexton, CIO at the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada. Rather, they are business executives with technology expertise. It’s a nuanced definition, she admits, but one whose understanding makes all the difference. And with that understanding comes a change in approach from passive (taking requests) to active, where a deep knowledge of the business empowers CIOs to offer not only technology solutions to business problems, but business solutions to business problems. In this interview with healthsystemCIO Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra, Sexton discusses this dynamic, her journey from the help desk to information security officer to CIO, and the keys to building out a well-rounded team.



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BOLD STATEMENTS

I’m very intentional, again, about making sure I’m still talking to our line-level employees and making sure technology is working for them. What I say here all the time at UMC is that on the other side of every phone call, every ticket, every issue, is a patient.

… in order to be successful in the role and to be successful to the organization that you’re leading, you have to be able to recognize: I’m good at these things, but I’m going to need some people in here that are really good at those other things. Then, together, we’re all successful.

… it’s not IT and the business; it’s only the business.

Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s interview with Maria Sexton, CIO at the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada. I’m Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. Maria, thanks for joining me.

Maria: Thank you, Anthony. It’s great to be here.

Anthony: All right. Excited for a fun chat. Can you start off by telling me a little bit about your organization and your role.

Maria: Certainly. As you mentioned I’m the Chief Information Officer at University Medical Center of Southern Nevada or, as we lovingly and locally call it, UMC. UMC is a large healthcare system here in Southern Nevada. We are a 541-bed acute care hospital. We have clinics throughout the valley, primary care, urgent care, specialty clinics. We are the state’s only level 1 trauma, the state’s only level 2 peds trauma. We have a center for transplantation, burn care center, and we’re the oldest hospital healthcare system in the valley. We’ve been around for more than 90 years.

Anthony: Very good. You’ve got an interesting past, and we’ll touch on that, and I’ll tell you why. Now, this is going to be a security-focused interview. You have a lot of security experience where you were the information security officer and things like that. Very strong security background, but now the CIO, and I don’t know if you have a CISO so that’s something we can talk about. But just a little bit about your background.

I am seeing a lot more of this trend from an infrastructure-to-security-to-CIO role pipeline because of the importance of security, I think. It’s pretty clear. But just tell me a little bit about your journey and we’ll go from there.

Maria: Sure. Gosh, it seems like a thousand years ago but it was just about 30 years ago that I started in IT, as a lot of people do, on the help desk. I started in my career in 1996. Interestingly enough, the same time the internet came into being. It was a great time to be in technology at that time. I started in IT, again, in help desk. I started doing desktop support and things like that...