EP 24: CIO’s: Mary Alice Annecharico and Donna Roach Lead Change

The percentage of women serving and leading as Chief Information Officers (CIO’s) for major organizations is still in the dismal single digits.  But in this episode, Diva Tech Talk had the privilege of interviewing two of them:  Mary Alice Annecharico, Senior VP and CIO for Henry Ford Health Systems, and Donna Roach, CIO for Via Christi Health Systems.  Here are their stories and some leadership lessons.

Mary Alice shared that her enthusiasm for healthcare started at the tender age of three years old, and explained how she evolved into leading one of Detroit’s largest health systems. She was always passionate about being a nurse; it was an “innate part” of who she was. Early in her career, she worked in a critical care unit that began using computers. A new leader complimented her on having a spirit for change and then she was asked to help develop the organization's computer-based electronic records.

“I looked at him and said: I can’t do that! I’m a nurse,” she said. “But then I embraced the idea.” Mary Alice has a Bachelor of Science Degree as a Registered Nurse, and a Master’s in Health Science. As long as she could still work in healthcare, she embraced leading technology changes.

Now, Mary Alice, is working for Henry Ford Health Systems which is celebrating 100 years of healthcare service. She says it’s her favorite job. She leads the organization’s technology services, supporting and stewarding the investments they place in technology and manages a staff of over 600 people.

“We truly have fun. It’s a balance of technology, relationship-building, and delivering health services,” she said.

Henry Ford Health System used to create it’s own electronic medical records --- a system that worked well for  25 years. With the advent of healthcare reform, they partnered with EPIC to implement a clinical transformational journey. In just 16 months, they have replaced all systems for clinical care, in record time, to achieve much higher levels of efficiency and success.

What are Mary Alice’s lessons and advice? If you have a problem to solve, you need everyone at the table to make transformational change. Mary Alice advises that you be authentic, and be brave to build trust and create change. Being energetic and motivated is a characteristic that helps create change. Mary Alice also says she’s committed to being a lifelong learner.

Mary Alice overcame some challenges along her path to becoming a CIO. Whether they are “event changers” or part of your day-to-day basics, Mary Alice says that a CIO can’t know it all. You have to be a part of a team to work together to solve problems and execute.

“Challenge is exciting. I’m not afraid of it,” Mary Alice said. “Sometimes the culture of an organization doesn’t enable you to be who you are. Be brave enough and true to yourself to realize it.”

Top advice she offers for women: look for internships and opportunities for mentors. She recognizes external STEM programs who help women connect and grow with mentorship. The journey should be lifelong. A technology you like can be associated with so many challenges in your career/mission. Don’t be afraid to learn and try it!

“For so many years women put ourselves in our own cocoon. Being able to reach out to others who are as impassioned as you, that’s really important,” she said. “There’s no longer a glass ceiling. It’s exciting.”

You can connect with Mary Alice Annecharico at 313-874-9587, any time. Her personal email address is amaryalice10@gmail.com.

For the second half of this episode we spoke with our second CIO, Donna Roach. Donna has been in healthcare IT for over thirty years. She has a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s in Health Administration.

Donna said she’s grateful to have had so much support and guidance in her career. Jobs where she had to stretch her capabilities were the most fulfilling to her. One of these projects was in Illinois as a project manager for a new technology implementation. She really helped to implement a new clinical information system. 

“Those are the fun times. When you bring people together and work really hard,” she said. “And I had a baby in between!”  She reflected on the three reasons this made a good experience: good teamwork, challenging work, and a culture that supported her growth.

Donna was the CIO for three hospitals in Kalamazoo for three years before she took her current role at Via Christi Health Systems. She was given the opportunity to serve at the new hospital in Wichita, Kansas. Donna shared how they adopted Ascension Health Systems value-driven processes to support the mission. The organization is faith-based and focuses on service, which also inspires Donna’s fulfillment in her work.

Donna now manages over 150 people, who work within the Ascension system. She thinks that a couple of strengths that have helped her to succeed are creative thinking, and having strong convictions about fostering innovative ideas. She’s also a big relationship builder and networker.

“My daughter always gives me a hard time. She tells me I’m such a ‘people person.’ I thought I was an introvert,” she said. “But I like building teams, and bringing people to the table.”

Part of Donna’s network is her church, her community, and being on the board of CHIME (the College of Health Information Management Executives). She said that joining that board was a big move for her, because she’s always been a passionate supporter of the organization

Donna has noticed the times where she has been the only woman at the table, and was asked to take notes. “I’m not your note taker,” she said. Early on, she had to push through that sort of discriminatory expectation. Now, being a women CIO isn’t something that is on her mind as much. She encourages women entering the industry to not get too caught up with gender. She’s had great mentors who are both men and woman.

When it comes to leadership, Donna suggests that you put yourself out there to develop your relationships and networks. Be purposeful in creating your network, and be willing to give back and volunteer for others. Don’t be afraid of failure or of others who might disagree with you.

“Sometimes we’re more concerned with confirming that we’re not using our skills, our creative skills, to bring them to the table,” she said.

Throughout her career, Donna reflected on how grateful she is to have had a supportive family around her. Sometimes, career moves can be difficult and really impact your family. Knowing how important family is can help you make certain that decisions are supporting your family as much as you are supporting yourself.

You can connect with Donna Roach at donna.roach@via-christi.org.

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Ep 23: Heidi Slade:Successful Merger of Art and Technology

Diva Tech Talk interviewed Heidi Slade, Senior Analyst, Business & Design, and Professional Scrum Master at Tyler Technologies, headquartered in Plano, Texas. Tyler Tech is a leading provider of end-to-end information management solutions and services for local governments.  Eight times on the Forbes list of America’s Best Small Companies, Tyler partners with clients to empower efficiency in the public sector, serving cities, counties, schools and other government entities.

Heidi is a great example of a woman entering the field of technology through an unconventional path.  “I didn’t grow up with computers, at all,” she says. Getting her first “real” computer in college, Heidi originally majored in fine arts at the University of North Texas.  She switched majors, midstream, to get her B.A. in literature since she considered that more marketable in terms of her future mission.

Joining Tyler Technologies directly after college, Heidi spent the first 6 years building her career as an award-winning technical writer, while increasing her familiarity with software and coding.  

“Being on the back end,” she says, “your ego starts to grow.”  Reviewing the solutions for which she was creating documentation, she would often think: “Man, I would have done that better!”  Along the way, she also taught herself HTML and CSS and created some of her own personal websites while getting comfortable in the world of code.  Finally, she took the plunge and became a business analyst at Tyler.

In that role, Heidi directly works with public sector clients and performs a full analysis of their current laborious processes. Then she lays out those solutions as paperless processes, and hands the requirements and potential design over to developers who create the actual efficiency-enhancing public sector Web-based software solutions.  Heidi also verifies the efficacy of the final solutions, created by the developers, when they are in alpha and beta releases prior to full formal release to the client base.  

One of the functions about her role that Heidi loves is she ensures that any user with visual or other physical disabilities can use the Tyler Tech systems, seamlessly.  This is crucial. If they are not appropriately created, “our clients can get sued,” she says, “and that comes back to me!”  

Because these applications are also utilized by a wide swath of the general population, “I need to make sure that these applications are very simple,” Heidi says.  “You have to consider the personality of the human being, who is on the other side of your technology. “  Some Tyler Tech systems are used by court systems and the people with whom they deal.  Heidi says “I am creating communication between the public and the courts. So everything I do has to facilitate positive, healthy communication between those two entities.”

In Heidi’s mind “developers are absolutely artists. Being a business analyst for Web apps is the perfect merge of art and technology for me.”

What are her tips for achieving career momentum?  Heidi advises other women to be courageous; to never consider their gender or lack of experience as a factor in their success.  “I walked in and said I know I can do this,” she says. “I really didn’t know how to but I learned along the way. “  She also credits her ability to speak in front of large crowds as a door opener to experiences she might not have, otherwise, had.  

Heidi recommends that young women pay attention to etiquette.  “When your clients are people like judges, high-powered attorneys and mayors, they notice things like etiquette,” she says.  Another bit of advice she offers is: “Pay attention to your audience,” in terms of dress, and how you speak.  To underscore this last piece of advice, Heidi recommends Women, Work and The Art of Savoir Faire, written by the former female CEO of Veuve Cliquot  --- a book that inspired her along the way.

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Ep 22: Jacqueline Rosenblatt: Positive Egalitarian Leader

Diva Tech Talk interviewed Jacqueline Rosenblatt, President, Elect, for the Michigan Chapter of HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) and Vice President, Clinical Operations at MPRO.  

MPRO is an independent nonprofit specializing in health care quality improvement and medical review; and also provides consultative services, medical and utilization review and data analysis to federal agencies, state Medicaid and public health agencies, health care facilities, private health plans and other third party payers.

Jacquie’s 30-plus year career has been a “really interesting path” as she describes it.  After receiving her Bachelors of Science degree in Clinical Nursing at the University of Michigan, she began as a clinical nurse in the pediatric ICU department at the Yale New Haven Health System in Connecticut. While she was happy with the work, she says: “I knew I wanted more.”  An emerging topic that fascinated her was the process through which new parents and critically ill newborns tried to attach to each other.  Jacquie subsequently got her Master’s Degree to study that issue.  “I never knew where I was going to end up,” she says.

That field of study, and her own experience as the mother of a child with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) inspired Jacquie to pursue a PhD, specializing in the issues of attachment and learning disabilities.  In an ironic way, this also bought her to the field of technology, as Jacquie quickly learned that libraries no longer had card catalogue systems, since everything was computerized!  To afford the advanced degree, she also pursued parallel career advancement, and accepted a role at POH Medical Center in Pontiac, Michigan where she worked directly for the Chief Information Officer.  “I was hired to act as a liaison between the information technology department and the clinical staff,” Jacquie explains.

“The CIO gave me a lot of challenges and encouraged me to figure things out,” she says.  It was through one of those challenges that she began to get involved in coding after analyzing issues with a DOS-based order entry system.  It was also this period that encouraged Jacquie to learn everything she could about health information technology. Coincidentally, it was also the timeframe in which clinical informatics was coming to the forefront of the industry.  Through hard work, addressing those assigned challenges, Jacquie was promoted to become the Director of Clinical Informatics for POH, and held that role for 7 years. One of her observations about this period is that “there weren’t a lot of women and nurse in IT.  Nurses have taken a long time.  It’s only really recently that nurses have gone full-force into informatics.”  

How did that phenomenon, coupled with what she terms discriminatory “cultural expectations” mold her approach to her career?  Jacquie bluntly says that “It got to the point where I didn’t even want to acknowledge my nursing degree, because there’s an expectation that a nurse is a ‘helper’ and is subservient to the physician.  Rather than fighting that battle, I went to my highest degree.  I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed.”

After POH, Jacquie went on to join and hold succeeding roles of responsibility at MPRO.  Her current Vice President role there is “overseeing all the clinical contracts.”  Among other things her team leads quality reviews; helps empower information technology adoption; and recommends and manages workflow design and process redesign.  Ultimately, she considers her major contribution to be “ensuring that MPRO has a strategic vision” for itself and its customers.  “I am back to where I started,” Jacquie says, “translating all these technologies and initiatives to the providers so they understand them.”

With her rich background, Jacquie has some key success concepts she emphasizes:

• Have respect for others — “Respect the people you work with, and your leaders.”

• Gain the respect of others – “Continue to always do good work and if it doesn’t go anywhere, resolve to move on.”

• Understanding – “For one thing, you need to understand that not everybody does things the same way.”

As a team leader, she says her #1 job is “to stay out of the way of people and allow them to do a good job, and also allow them to fail” without personal criticism or blame.  “It is also important to tell people when you don’t agree. But then it’s important to trust them.”

Jacquie emphasizes how crucial it is to retain a thirst for knowledge and “learn from everyone!”   Her final words of wisdom are:  “It’s also very important to resist the temptation to become a negative leader.  The key is to try and be a very positive leader.  No ‘trash talking!’ ”

MPRO can be found at www.mpro.org and Jacqueline can be contacted at jrosen@mpro.org

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Ep 21: Tara Reed: CEO and Founder Feels the Magic of Side Projects

Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University several years ago, Kollecto.com founder, Tara Reed, had no plan to enter the technology field in 2012. But an exciting internship profoundly changed her life’s mission.  Diva Tech Talk’s podcast with her examines that, and her current journey into tech entrepreneurship.

“I fell into technology by accident,” Tara explains.  “I was living in New York, and, of course, there was an emphasis on financial services.”  She accepted an internship for the summer of 2012 at venerable brokerage, JP Morgan, only to (“on a whim”) apply simultaneously to GOOGLE, and get an offer that was too good to refuse.  She was recruited to spend the summer on the “Google Offers” project, to help the industry giant compete with Groupon for an extended share of the small business retail market.  There, Tara learned good lessons from that project’s failure, while experiencing an enlightening summer in Silicon Valley (“with free lunches!”)

That project’s failure “prepared me well for building my own company,” Tara said. “Lots of start-ups and creative projects don’t work.  You learn, though, and take everything you learn and apply it somewhere else.”

Post-internship, Tara joined fast-growing Foursquare, a company dedicated to creating applications that help people keep up/meet up with friends, and discover great places.   There she worked on the marketing team, monetizing their apps for small businesses.  Most crucially, she met and cultivated life-changing mentors, advisers and great leaders in design and marketing, who helped Tara wander ‘outside the box’ in terms of  her own trajectory, “forcing me to think about what a career inside of technology could look like.”   Her lessons were to consistently learn to ask herself four hard questions, as she made decisions:

1. “Are you taking enough risk in your career?”

2. “Do you really want to do exactly what you are doing?”

3. “What truly motivates you?”

4. “How do you make an impact?”

From Foursquare, Tara moved to Seattle, to accept a role at tech industry behemoth, Microsoft, as part of the Windows marketing team. But she found that the Microsoft culture was incorrect for her.  It was a huge team; she was used to making a strong individual difference.

While there, she began a “side project” that has now morphed into her full-time company.   She looked at the question of why the process of acquiring visual art was so much different and harder than the process to acquire other kinds of art — like music or fashion, all very accessible from the Web.   There was a vacuum when it came to art that people put on their walls, and she knew she could fill that vacuum.  Her “side project” (Kollecto) was born.

Tara credits an initiative called Orbital (“a side project accelerator program”) for kick starting her success.  “What’s cool about Orbital is that everyone is encouraged to build things that others will find useful.”  She joined Orbital’s first boot camp, where she achieved her goal of moving from Step Zero (having a good idea) to Step One (just getting started!).  Her Step One involved creating a landing page to test the concept of how much potential users might know about art and how much help they might need or pay for.  Essentially this tested demand for her services and future products.  Orbital was key to Tara’s success, because as she admitted:  “Entrepreneurship is tough. Sometimes you have to go back a step to move forward.”  And the Orbital group has all experienced that, understands, and supports the circuitous journey.

Leaving Microsoft in 2014, Tara formally launched Kollecto.  Along the way, Tara has amassed knowledge that can help any budding entrepreneur.  Her advice is “build a service first” because it encourages dialogue with possible users.  Doing that for Kollecto enabled her to build the first application based on conversations with interested prospects.  “Hell is building fancy stuff that no one uses,” she comments.

Kollecto has two major components.  The main Website helps inexperienced art collectors buy affordable art by pairing them with personal expert advisers to find art and negotiates prices; and ArtCollectingSchool.com is a series of interactive lessons to acquaint novices with the art world, and teach them how to acquire art from $300 to $1500 for their walls, without other assistance.  The two segments organically comprise the company’s revenue stream, and are supplemented by Tara’s personal blog “BuildingKollecto.com.”

For Tara’s business, social media tools have been very important in expanding her client base, with almost 51% of Kollecto website’s traffic coming from social media sources.  A tool she uses to great advantage is Socedo.com, which targets users based on their Twitter comments.  Tara also makes a practice of “building out loud” as the company grows —using social media to engage in useful dialogue and debates that help her organization blossom.

Tara’s primary personal challenge ( as we have found with other Diva Tech Talk guests ) is balancing multiple roles.  “Finding out how to balance your interest in being a creator, and in being a CEO/business person is hard,” she said.  “Creators are more likely to throw things away.   CEO’s and business leaders have to take fewer risks and concentrate on sustainable growth.”  From that, Tara’s final words of wisdom are:  “Select your hats.  Then find time to juggle your hats!”

Kollecto can be found at kollecto.com.

Tara can be followed on Twitter at @tarareed_ or you reach her via email at tara@kollecto.com

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Ep 20: Jillian Winn: Game On and Follow Your Passion

In this episode, we got the chance to sit down with savvy and generous entrepreneur Jillian Winn, who shares her insights into start-ups, gaming and women, and more.

Jillian was an only child until she was 15 years old. She remembers never being pushed into science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) fields, but remembers being taught that the “sky was the limit.” When she grew up and went to college, she studied Political Theory and Telecommunications focusing on web design.

 “You don’t really know what you will like until you do it,” Jillian said. Pursuing knowledge along two different (and seemingly unrelated paths) offered her a two-pronged way to explore her two biggest passions. After graduating, she considered many options, but settled on a graduate program for her master’s in telecommunications. While at graduate school, she also dove into gender studies in technology and gaming.

How do you get girls to like science and think it’s fun? She was involved in game research studies in graduate school which explored this question. Jillian said it helped her learn to be conscious of gender roles and women in technology. Some of the studies brought up the question as to whether women had or made enough free time to play games. Jillian’s research provided the first research evidence of a relationship between leisure time availability and how much digital games are played. 

The findings suggested one reason women play fewer games than men is because they are required to fulfill more obligatory activities, leaving them less available leisure time, which in turn makes them less likely to “make” time for games. It was found that not only do women report having less free time than men, but their free time is available in smaller chunks, and they play digital games for shorter periods of time than men. What programs are out there to get into gaming? How does it become a part of career? Jillian shares information on Michigan State University’s Game Design & Development program (http://gamedev.msu.edu), which is one of the top game programs in the country.

After Jillian finished her master’s degree, she entered the world of entrepreneurship, doing more research, and then working as Faculty at MSU in the Department of Media and Information (http://tism.msu.edu) (previously the Telecommunication Department) where she taught web and technology course, ran “game camps” and summer programs. She noted that, if you’re younger, there’s lots of pre-college programs (http://mi.msu.edu/camps/) around technology, web development, and gaming with some designed specifically for women, covering a plethora of different topics.

 “One of the things with games in particular ---  it’s one thing to play them,  it’s a different thing to make them,” she said. Lots of the kids who go to camps discover if they really want to pursue a career in gaming.

 Jillian reflects on how she really had independence to drive and create initiatives while at Michigan State University, a characteristic that helped her become a full-fledged entrepreneur. She subsequently co-founded a mission-oriented company called Signing Savvy (https://www.signingsavvy.com), a sign language resource, which aims to provide the most comprehensive online sign language resource for parents, educators, interpreters, students, or anyone interested in American Sign Language.

 “You type in a word like ‘apple’ and you can then watch a video showing you how to sign apple,” she said. “You can look up signs, you can study signs. It helps you learn.” Parents can use the tool to make word lists to share signs with teachers, kids, and other relatives to better practice sign language. Signing Savvy was built with a mix of coding languages, and is available online and on iOS and Android applications. Jillian stressed how passionate she is to help others learn and use their resources, providing some free access for users.

 What’s been the most rewarding thing for Jillian? She has seen over 10 million people use the Signing Savvy website, so far, and she loves to see and hear stories on how they are using it. Sometimes it’s a veteran who lost his hearing at war and needed a resource to learn sign language; sometimes it’s children and parents, but the tool can be used for any age.

 There are definitely challenges with starting a technology company. Jillian says it can feel lonely, and sometimes people don’t understand the work it takes.  “I have a website up; what more could you be doing?” she claims is sometimes a stereotype she hears. There’s often a misunderstanding on how long it might take to launch a technology company.

 Jillian likes to volunteer and connect with others who have an entrepreneurial spirit. She’s an active leader in the Lansing area technology scene and a Co-Founder of the Michigan Technology Network (http://lansing.mitn.org) She’s also a third-generation MSU “Spartan,” and loves to teach and give back to the university when she can.

How has being a woman in tech affected her? Jillian says she was fortunate to have women bosses at her first two jobs at the university. She says it’s rare to get to work with mentors and successful women in tech; so she’s grateful that for her, it was twice in a row at the start of her career.

 Her advice for women in tech:

• Take risks
• Find what you’re passionate about
• You can’t be afraid of failing

Jillian reflects back on when she was one of the first female pole vaulters in the state of Michigan. It was a very male-oriented event, and she was one of the first woman participating in the pole vaulting segment. It taught her not to be afraid to try new things or to be the first to do something, but also helped her to be a team player.  “I really believe you always need to think in terms of a team aspect and how the team can succeed,” she said. Volunteering often helped her show her this too.

“Be humble and help others. You’re not going to reap all the rewards, and that’s a good thing. You want everyone to reap the rewards. Together, we make things happen,” she said.

From pole vaulting, to gaming, and starting a tech company with an incredibly worthwhile mission, Jillian said she’s most lucky to just have followed her passion. That passion has created a tool that helps people and knowing that drives her forward each and every day.

To learn more about Signing Savvy go to: signingsavvy.com. 

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