Projects are the primary implementation vehicle of the corporate strategy. Insights into the progress, roadblocks and speed bumps of those projects is the critical role your Project Management Office (PMO) needs to perform flawlessly. The PMO tracks corporate strategy and ensures the project portfolio contains the right projects and resources to ensure the expected return on the strategy. Properly performing PMOs should be identifying and alerting the executive team of projects drive further investments and alerting the executive team to need of projects that require reprioritization, additional support, postponement, scaling back, or even cancellation to deliver the strategy.

Here’s the problem. PMOs often underperform—badly.

Buy (don’t build) healthcare data insights to improve data investment ROI

Healthcare organizations have been investing heavily in big data analytics, software, hardware, staff, and services to get insights into quality and cost. These insights will be critical as healthcare facilities take on more and more risk in a value-based care model. About 40 percent of healthcare providers are expanding IT budgets, a recent IDC Health Insights report revealed. The report noted that analytics is the top reason for the increase.

Two of Capto’s centers of excellence – healthcare and TME (Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment) – at first would not seem to have much overlap, but our experience finds significant commonality in the business and technical issues faced by these industries. One area of similarity is the need for both healthcare and TME to develop an omnichannel approach to improve customer experience. In a December 2016 study by Chief Marketing Officer Council, 49% of marketers stated that alignment between physical and digital customer experiences is selective at best.

Capto CEO, Tracy Currie, was recently interviewed for Healthcare Finance Management Association's CFO Forum by Laura Ramos Hewer.

Given the many competing priorities in an organization, CFOs need to make sure they understand the "why" behind their IT investments. Read the HFMA CFO Forum article.

Disruption is the new reality for business leaders, extinction the ever-present threat. Unpredictable, abrupt change is obsoleting time-tested companies and long-standing industries and is giving rise to new business models to replace the old. Varying levels of vulnerability and volatility are cycling across industries, fueled by technological (digital), developments. Now it is the telecom, media and entertainment (TME) industry’s turn.

The imperative that Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and Chief Information or Technology Officers (CIOs) merge their agendas to collaborate for success of their companies, their CEOs and their futures is at the crux of the TME industry’s fight for customer retention, new skill sets and fresh sources of revenue growth.

Consumerism in healthcare is not yet at tsunami-level force, but it clearly represents an imminent and undeniable disruption in healthcare’s traditional business models.

It is only natural that this trend is putting tremendous pressure on heads of marketing. It is also challenging CIOs to bring their expertise to bear, and to clearly articulate the role IT can play as healthcare organizations seek to transform the way they engage with their customers.

Creating effective, high-performing and well-governed outsourcing deals was one of the key services Capto offered at our launch in 2009. SYNAPTIC Outsourcing is still a key service we offer our clients. The fundamentals remain solid, but how we help make these deals successful has evolved dramatically. I’ll explain how we’ve applied our SYNAPTIC Sourcing methodology differently over time.

SYNAPTIC Outsourcing was born out of our personal experience supported by extensive research that confirmed our hypothesis at the time: IT outsourcing was broken. Deals were under-performing economically and operationally when compared to other broad business trends such as supply chain management.

Last week I attended the Accountable Care and Health IT Summit in Chicago focused on Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). The general belief that CMS’ MACRA and MIPS payment models are changing too fast for health organizations to adapt was common. And while there are great examples of companies using data and telehealth to impact population health and new technologies and patient processes that are both improving outcomes and costs, everyone is really figuring it out as they go.

A key issue is that of reimbursement. As ACOs coordinate and/or buy up physician practices, the missing piece is making sure they understand how to negotiate reimbursements with the payers, including private payers. As ACOs step into the role of ‘payvider’, as it’s been coined, a level of sophistication around contracting and risk analysis is required.

Healthcare organizations have a painful history of investing in expensive information technology solutions, only to end up disappointed. This often stems from a disconnect between the IT department’s role in the organization and the overall business goals of the enterprise. A number of factors can cause this misalignment, the first of which is that IT is historically a service-oriented, back-office function. IT sees their internal counterparts as clients rather than colleagues, and IT tends to focus first on complying with requests from other departments rather than contributing to, and prioritizing the overall goals and strategy of, the business as a whole.

Telecom and entertainment companies are facing this question right now: Do you launch a pioneering, bleeding edge virtual reality (VR) experience if you know the customer experience (CX) is going to be lacking?

NBC and Samsung took a leap with their VR coverage of the Summer Olympics in Brazil. Was it cool that they could offer the experience? Absolutely. Was the experience a good one? Yes and no. Acknowledging the novelty cool factor and the sheer courage at testing it on an event as big as the Olympics, the picture quality and timeliness of content was lacking making the experience just ok.

Journey mapping is a disciplined approach to understanding how your customers experience your organization so that organizations can make necessary adjustments to improve the overall experience. No journey map is the same from organization to organization or even from service to service within a single organization. An organization may have a “master” customer experience map with many subset experience maps for an online purchasing experience, or the service journey or the post-service journey.

Capto specifically works with the telecom, media and entertainment (TME) and healthcare industries on mapping customer journeys. While the industries vary greatly, the same process can be used to guide our client organizations through a journey mapping process.

Healthcare organizations (HCOs) have been, and continue to be, invested heavily in IT to improve outcomes and lower costs. While much of this investment continues to support the implementation and optimization of mandated electronic medical record (EMR) systems, the post-EMR implementation world is on the horizon, and all of those EMR systems will be generating tremendous amounts of data. According to PwC’s 2016 Annual Global CEO Survey, 95% of healthcare CEOs are already looking beyond EMR and say they are exploring better ways to harness and use big data.

Telecom, media and entertainment industries are crossing paths with increasing regularity in hopes of seeking a fruitful partnership. Navigating the increasingly connected, ever-changing wireless ecosystem is not for the faint of heart. Inking the deal is just the first step. Integrating technologies, teams and operating cultures are what can really make or break the customer experience and thus profits.

I recently attended the Healthcare Financial Management Association's National Institute (HFMA ANI) conference in Las Vegas. With news headlines often screaming of healthcare cost increases and price hikes, the hesitation to discuss money and health outcomes in the same conversation is understandable. The result is gymnastic contortions of language that is unproductive at best.

Capto CEO, Tracy Currie, had the opportunity to sit down with Carol Flagg of RCM Answers during the recent Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) ANI conference. They discussed the business and customer experience opportunities for healthcare in the near future.

Organizations are missing a valuable opportunity if mid-year planning only considers a budget or project review for the rest of the year. Asking “How are we doing against what we said we wanted to do?”, is necessary, but not enough for a well-run, forward-thinking organization. Now is the time for company leaders to review their 2016 strategy and reposition for 2017 and 2018. Think of this as a shift from a dashboard approach to a focus on the business horizon.

The concept of defining specific episodes of care for the purposes of measuring quality and efficiency of care has been around for a long time. EOCs define the scope of care and qualification for specific treatable conditions, which is challenging considering the potential complexities of each procedure and condition. EOCs are essential to enabling effective value-based payment models and effective population health programs, but the industry has struggled for years to make standard EOCs part of healthcare.

CIOs and CFOs need to stop worrying about aligning IT with the business and start running IT as a business to resolve the majority of issues CIOs are having getting a seat at the strategy table and collaborating with their business unit peers.

CIOs and the CFOs who work closely with them can check out the specific steps I outline in my recent article, "IT Should Drive Decision Making, Not Just Participate", published in CFO Magazine.

Data is exceptionally valuable for companies making decisions concerning reducing costs and increasing revenues. Though it’s seemingly simple to run a data report, getting to the right actionable insight can offer both opportunities and missteps.