"Driving an organization towards the "customer service” is a win-win as the users and fellow executive management appreciate it"

JASON WORLEY
CIO
First Choice ER

Jason Worley has over 20 years of experience in building and leading Information Technology teams. Having worked in several high-growth companies under various sectors including healthcare, telecommunicaions/ security, and financial clearinghouse, he understands the challenges in successfully growing a company and balancing technology needs, spend, innovation and scalability. Jason’s education includes an undergraduate degree in Management Science and Computer Systems from Oklahoma State University and MBA from the University of Oklahoma. He has earned numerous industry certifications over his career.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations.
Falling storage costs, and an ever-increasing appetite by users for nearly unlimited storage and access to their files anywhere at any time from any device, have created a challenge for IT departments. It also nurtured the widespread use of devices such as the iPhone, iPad, Androids in the BYOD environment. IT is expected to support them all, as well as make enterprise data and services available on these devices. Adding to it, the (nearly) free cloud-based storage of sites like the Dropbox puts pressure on the IT department to match their services with them; otherwise users will just work around IT systems. My wish-list for 2013 would include an enterprise-level Dropbox-like functionality, whereby users can still maintain their data in the “normal” enterprise location, and on the back-end, an enterprise Dropbox-like server app could be configured on a per-user basis to sync with the cloud.

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier.
Services like Dropbox have really changed the game by offering seamless and effective solutions, that has put many IT departments back on their heels, and dramatically dates previous solutions like built-in “my documents” synchronization and VPN’s for many needs. What keeps me up at night is what happens if or when one of these cloud-based services has a security breach, an unscheduled or prolonged service outage, user error, or data loss? Users will come begging their IT department to help, but depending on the infrastructure, user data being synchronized with the cloud-based sync tool may not be visible to the enterprise data backup solution, so recovery may be impossible.

Technology Trends Impacting Enterprise Business Environment
Over 20+ years in the industry, I have seen the centralization, de-centralization of data and processing cycle many times. Mini/mainframes in the 80’s, client-server in the 90’s, web technology in the 2000’s and so on. Over the past several years, we’ve seen a hybrid of this model, most recently with cloud-based data solutions such as Dropbox and iCloud. Historically, enterprises have been the owners of their own data. I believe enterprises are asking themselves if there is a new sheriff in town, and if they will not only have ownership of user-created data, or may not even have visibility or access to it, for example, from a backup perspective.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO
Recently, my role has evolved from strategic planner and decision-maker to predicting what will be the next moves in the BYOD consumer device/app which might expect support. The pace of innovation in the consumer device market, and its impact at the enterprise, has been surprising, and I believe it’s here to stay. So enterprises need to figure out how to adapt.

Lessons learned as a CIO
I like to think we run a pretty unique IT-shop. Our IT-to-staff ratios are very low for a company of our size, and I put in place and reinforce a “users are your customer” approach to IT. We like to provide a near-utility level of service to our users, assuring their data and systems are in place when they need them. In most of the previous IT groups I have led or been a part of, there was almost “gestapo”-like mentality in the IT group; bordering on control-freak, huge egos like, “nothing happens in the enterprise without our say”. I was fortunate to join First Choice ER literally at the very beginning, and build a lean and efficient team, that has a genuine customer-service attitude towards the users. Having been in both environments, I would say driving an organization towards the “customer service” end of the spectrum is a win-win, the users and fellow executive management appreciate it, it creates efficiency, and avoids the common perception of the IT department as the gatekeeper to everything.