一年青海归对中国HIT的思考（zt）

小城医生

lessons learned and clouds to be cleared - 1.5 months in China's HIT marketJust read an article on HBR website about strategic planning. I took some time to look at a project I reviewed recently and excitedly (or misearably) found that the client has made all fatal mistakes described in the article. I guess it's not a surprise for people in China's HIT industry. I don't want to bother and discuss in details. Here are the four mistakes:
Skipping Rigorous Analysis
Believing Strategy Can Be Built in a Day
Failing to Link Strategic Planning with Strategic Execution
Dodging Strategy Review Meetings


A few lessons learned:

• The IT decision making model varies among hospitals. A common thing is the president made final buying decision. Sometimes a VP in charge of IT plays important role in the process. IT department leads more things that they should do so most likely IT department is taking a stronger role it should've taken due to different reasons. Service departments are taking a position of "Informed" or "Consulted" at best. Some best practices are not results of systematic changes but rather a one-person effect and may not be sustainable.
• Change management is avoided in several cases I've seen. The ability and readiness to lead and embrace change has nothing to do with one's domain expertise. I had the worst client meeting ever (considering I'm not old enough new record could be set soon) with a well known expert. I was surprised by so much finger-pointing and his assumption that an improved strategy can be implemented without a change in process and without admitting that some past strategy had been flawed. (I updated the definition of "experts" in my own dictionary after this single event.)
• Tricks in numbers. I have the habit to memorize some key numbers since my master's education. Well, I was surprised many times how inaccurate the numbers I am handling are. The Ministry of Health data reports on overall health expenditure as a % of GDP varied from one year to another (due to the update of annual GDP by the Bureau of Statistics) and it's not up-to-date; Some industry statistics have to be given a 2nd look as some really over-estimated the situation, etc.
• Unrealistic expections. These expections include speed/timeline, investment and cost, required resources, long-term effect, collaboration among stakeholders, strategy execution ability, and most importantly changes required to be made. Managing client's expectation through various intervention techniques and allowing clients to develop healthy expections are a big challenge to consulting proejcts.
• High level management and decision makers lack of IT methodology and management framework. Education is of much work and critical to the sucess to some consulting projects. In the US, I've worked with clients who know very well about the business model to take (sometimes too much) advantage of the service fees they paid; well in China we just have our fingers crossed and hope that 1 year after the project is delivered our clients understand a certain percentage of the essentials. Finding the best way to educate the clients as the project is ongoing is a key to sucess.

Things to be figured out:

• One thing I'm trying to figure out is what is the "Business Strategy" in a common China hospital's context. The first and the most important thing I learned from the IT management class is aligning IT strategy with the business strategy. How am I able to help my clients to do this if neither of us can lay down the instutuition's business strategy on the paper?
• What is the real needs of the clients/market? How the needs are shaped and how they evolve?
• How to structure the services to better satisfy client's needs? What are some of the new business options?

ljyxinxi

可以写成中文吗？我想会有更多的人过来坐沙发的。