Rick Allen, CIO, Southern Regional Medical Center, Chapter 2

When you’re being offered a spot on a C-suite that has seen significant turnover, there are really two choices: run, or do some investigating. Rick Allen chose the latter, having a long conversation with the outgoing CIO that enabled him to accept the role with eyes wide open. And even though may have questioned the decision when the CEO stepped down just a few weeks into his tenure, Allen has stayed the course, thanks largely to an IT staff that has remained in place and has bought into the organization’s philosophy. In this interview, he discusses the challenges of moving forward while keeping costs low, how he plans to bring more relevance to IT, and the mentors who showed him “how to be a CIO the right way.”

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* His approach as the new CIO

* Taking cues from Ed Marx & Ed Brown

* Value of rounding — “You have to have that interpersonal relationship to be able to ask them to do things.”

* Dealing with the CEO’s sudden retirement

* CIO = air traffic controller

* Bringing more relevance to IT



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Bold Statements

I’d never ask them to do anything that I’m not willing to get out and do myself. So when it comes down to writing a report or a dashboard, if I have to sit and bang through it myself, I have to sit and bang through it myself just to show that I’m willing to and I can.

When they went through the whole Ebola crisis last year, I reached out just to let him know that there was support amongst his peers, that if there was anything that we could do or anything that I could, I was there for him. Because what I got from him meant that much to me.

There are a lot of things that we didn’t have on our radar that I now have to not only have on our radar, but have it done by October 1 so that we can attest this year.

I’ve got a team I truly can lean on to help get things done. They’ve bought in on the vision; they’ve bought in on where I think I want to try to take the place and what we want to do with IT and how we want to try to bring more relevance to IT within the organization.

We’re adding new functionality, we’re adding new tools for them, and while we’re doing that, we’re making sure that the training’s in place and we’re making sure the communication’s out there, and then we’ll start building on that base frame.

Gamble:  That speaks highly too of the former CIO to be able to really open up to you and talk about the things that went wrong.  I don’t imagine that that’s an easy thing to do.

Allen:  No. And I think part of it is you’re not necessarily admitting weakness, just ‘here’s what happened. Here’s what I wasn’t able to do and here’s why I wasn’t able to do it,’ that kind of thing.

Gamble:  So when you did step in, was there more turnover as far as the staff that worked for you?

Allen:  No. The staff that’s here has been are fairly long-tenured. There was an opening that we hired a security analyst right after I started. Other than that, we haven’t had an opening in IT at all.

Gamble:  Can you walk through how you approached the staff when you did take over, just as far as how you built relationships and things like that?

Allen:  There’s somebody that I actually look up to very much that’s a CIO of a major organization — or, up until recently was a CIO of a major organization — who really talked about interpersonal relationships, and it’s Ed Marx from Texas Health Resources. He’s a very interpersonal person. He cares about the people that work for him. And then the CIO that I worked for, for the 12 years that I was at the other organization [Wallace Ed Brown],