娇色导航

Cathy O'Sullivan? Hello.

Welcome to 娇色导航Leadership Live Australia. I'm Cathy O'Sullivan, editorial director for Foundry in Australia and New Zealand. My guest today is Suma Shivalingaiah, who is the Chief Information Officer at Eastern Health, welcome to the podcast, Suma. Appreciate you being with us today. ? Suma Shivalingaiah?

Thanks, Cathy, thanks for the opportunity. ? Cathy O'Sullivan? Great stuff.

Look, really looking forward to hearing more about you and Eastern Health. So take us back to the start. Tell us about how you got your start in technology, and I guess, what have been some of the highlights of your career to date? ? Suma Shivalingaiah? Thanks, Cathy.

So my interest in technology stems from my childhood seeing my parents. So my initial childhood was in Canada and seeing my parents carry two big processes. This is in the 1980s from Canada to their hometown, and started off teaching computer to students, so they started their coaching classes.

So since childhood, I had an interest and I grew up learning dBASE, Pascal, Opus One to three and all of these technologies. Since then, I joined and did my bachelor's of computer science, and then I came to Australia, did my Masters in RMIT.

Started off my career in healthcare as an application developer, and then moved into different sectors, finance, utilities.

Then I moved into project management, portfolio management, then took up leadership roles in local government, then had an opportunity here at Eastern Health to join them, and that's how, sort of, I've gone through the ups and downs in the rollercoaster ride of technology. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Great that you had that from the start with your parents teaching IT. So look, as you said, you're now Chief Information Officer at Eastern Health. So tell us a bit more about the organization, what's its purpose, its mission, and how do you and the team support that?

? Suma Shivalingaiah?

Definitely, Eastern Health is one of the largest health services within Victoria. We have around 60-plus locations, and we have three emergency departments, around 100,000 or million episodes that we work through, and also we support around 18,000 staff and a large catchment.

This spans into emergency services, allied health, drug and alcohol, so mostly a lot of services and some amazing work that everyone does here at Eastern Health.

Within ICT, myself, the CIO, and one of our co-program directors, who's the CTO, we both manage the ICT department, which consists of a cyber team. We look after applications, infrastructure, the networks, and also a solution architecture team as well.

So that's sort of where we stem and where we manage all of these aspects within technology. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So you've also worked in utilities, you said, and finance. So tell us a bit about what you've noticed moving into the 娇色导航role in the health sector, even though you did start off your career in health.

So how does health differ, I guess from previous industries that you've worked in? ? Suma Shivalingaiah?

That's a very good question, Cathy. Health is very complex. And we also have a saying here that there's never a dull moment in health. I'm a very action oriented person.

I like new things and new challenges and innovation, and there's ample opportunities in health in working through those challenges, especially in the health sector, there's multiple domains and enterprise systems which are connected with each other, and we get the opportunity to actually see a good outcome with technology deployed which will help patients and healthcare professionals.

So, a? very satisfying role compared to other sectors, and, you know, in trying to help people in doing their job day to day while we roll out these smaller technologies. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So talk us through, then some of those achievements. You know, as you said, it's a very rewarding job in a sector that cares for so many people. So what have been some of the notable achievements of your team at Eastern Health in recent times? ? Suma Shivalingaiah?

So there are many, so hopefully I cover some of the important ones. So we have an incredible team here within our ICT department.

So with the help of our exec director of digital health and our co-program director, we developed our ICT strategy in 2022.? As part of the ICT strategy, our roadmap defined a lot of improvements within our team, which is improving our skill sets within our team.

Modernizing some of our legacy platforms that we had and enabling technologies for the future. So with those three aspects, we worked through many initiatives that we had to embed and roll out.

So we were successful with couple of those modernization initiatives, the Microsoft M365, we are embarking on a network uplift and modernization, and there's ample cyber security improvements and maturities that we have put in place.

So this was something that we proposed as part of our strategy, and with the support of the CEO and the board, we were able to start that journey, and we are continuing that journey. We're in the third year now, but we're continuing on that journey.

We also had a lot of opportunities to improve our governance framework within the ICT, uplifting that, introducing a centralized PMO tool so that we could actually measure the resourcing and allocate appropriate resourcing across the organization, and also work on compliance requirements for the organization.

So there are a lot of initiatives that we can talk about, but that was the key aspects of introducing the strategy and improving our skill set within ICT to support the business. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So just building out on that a bit further then can you tell us how you're using technology to enhance that patient and staff experience? ? Suma Shivalingaiah?

Yes, so in terms of we put patients in the center of everything we do, in terms of supporting the creations and also the patients. And some of the technologies we were using were quite old and legacy technologies, which also is a cyber risk for us.

So we had to modernize and provide more efficient technologies for staff to support their patient needs and and also do their jobs properly.

So we were able to introduce some modern platforms for them, establish more collaborative tools, and we also introduced this enterprise contact center as well, which helps associate and bring everyone together. So that was some of the aspects that we do.

And also from a cyber security perspective, the governance that we put in place. We also conduct regular simulation exercises to help with that. And also the awareness, which is quite important in this space to support staff members, and also within ICT to get trained in this space.

So there's a lot of things that we have done in that aspect which supports our patients and also our staff members. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So you touched on that a bit there. But I mean, you've mentioned earlier that you've got 18,000 staff, and I'm sure many more 1000s of people that you look after. So how do you ensure that adoption of those new technologies that you roll out?

And I guess, what kind of role does your team have in lifting digital literacy across the organization, especially when you're dealing with frontline staff and people who may not be behind a laptop all day, but actually out with patients. ? Suma Shivalingaiah?

That's an excellent question. Cathy, we always are faced with this challenge, and we do have various different types of stakeholders as well when we roll out technologies.

So we take change and adoption to be very critical in terms of all the technology projects or technologies that we roll out in some of the modernization initiatives we have worked on, few initiatives from a change perspective, which is called new ways of working with the Microsoft platform.

What that means is that we understand the workflows which people are used to in a certain way, which is manual, and how do they adopt into the new workflows with the new technology.

So we conduct a lot of training, and we also give them quick tips and tricks in terms of what they can do in those space to adopt them to the new technologies. Another initiative that we've just started now is Digital Champions.

This initiative is basically across the organization to identify who are the so quick super users who really are change agents for us and help us through this journey and in supporting others or their co workers in how do they actually adopt to the new modern technology?

So this is something that we are just introducing and across. It could be a cyber initiative, cyber awareness program.

It could be a new modernization tool that we're launching, or it could be an existing tool that we have launched, and there are still some workflows that need to be defined. So this is how we actually are promoting and uplifting the digital literacy.

We do also conduct regular surveys to assess where we are at and also improve on this and consider those feedback from what other initiatives we can bring across to build the digital literacy. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So Suma, cyber security is a challenge for every CIO, no matter what industry you're in, but particularly in health care. So what are your biggest challenges when it comes to maintaining cyber security and protecting organizational and patient data? ? Suma Shivalingaiah?

It's a very good question, Cathy. Cyber security is an ever changing landscape, with the threat increases every day.

So an interesting story is, when I started at Eastern Health, we were hit with ransomware attack, and pretty much all systems were down as we spent weeks to recover from that, and since then, we have a well established three-year cyber security roadmap.

We have done quite a lot of new things in that space to protect Eastern Health and keep our data and patients and staff safe in that manner, protecting our systems. So there's lots to do in this space.

We do conduct regular simulation exercises as well with the exec team, and also within our staff as well and with stakeholders, and also from a cyber security awareness perspective, we have multiple programs running, phishing exercises? running, that we were able to train and support our staff in this space.

We do group our initiatives based on the risk landscape, and we work through them from a priority order to reduce that risk to Eastern Health. But it is a very challenging environment. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Absolutely, and it's a team sport. Cyber - there's never an end to that it's just something that we have to continue to keep an eye on.

And so then Suma, tell us a bit about you know what role, I guess, partnerships with the likes of IT vendors, technology vendors, MSPs, what role do they play in your IT strategy, and what does a good partnership look like to you? ? Suma Shivalingaiah?

We have a lot of applications, Cathy, that we support at Eastern Health so probably around 200 plus business applications, most of them are supported by vendors. So we rely on vendors quite heavily in terms of providing us support.

What we expect from the vendors is to actually help us through the journey of, you know, filling in the skills gap that we have, and also through their success also see our success in implementing a lot of things in terms of their applications and supporting us.

We run emergency departments, and we actually have to support the business throughout their journey. And we do require support, in that sense, to keeping the lights on all the time with the BAU world.

And I think we seek vendor support in that sense, to support us through that journey. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So then there's a lot of noise around things like AI; what emerging technologies do you think will have the biggest impact on your industry? And what is your approach to things like AI? Do you see value in it for you and the organization? ? Suma Shivalingaiah? Absolutely.

AI has been one of the key topics of discussion within healthcare sector as well. So we have defined a governance framework across AI, basically from the Department of Health controls and direction. We defined our guidance and controls across AI.

We also managed to review the cybersecurity risks which are associated with AI. So we have monitoring tools in place which can help us through that journey.

Since it is actually new and we are still working our way through, how do we assess and how do we allow, actually, the utilization of good AI tools?

So we are embarking on some use cases with two partners so that we can trial this out in a controlled way, and of course, looking at the risks and managing and balancing that in the clinical space we are working through that journey, but definitely something which is...

something we are aware of, which could be a huge benefit, but we also need to be aware of the risks that are associated with this as well.

We are working through some good clinical use cases, which we are trying to measure and see if that would be a huge value add into the organization, but starting on this journey and developing it, looking through the governance structure. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So what then do you see as the biggest challenges facing CIOs and other IT leaders in the health sector in the coming years in Australia. ? Suma Shivalingaiah?

Well, Cathy, there's plenty, but if I have to name a few, I think one of the key challenges are around interoperability in terms of training systems together and having a centralized view of most of our enterprise systems.

We have got really good leadership from the Department of Health with our new Chief Digital Health Officer, and direction as well from a digital roadmap.

So we are working through some of those initiatives, and that probably will help us bring and align a lot of these siloed systems together. One of the other challenges is around resource retention.

So we work through upskilling our resources, and also there is a lot of demand in certain areas as well. So so that's something which is an ongoing challenge for us to motivate our staff and keep our staff working in the health domain.

And I would also see that the cost optimization initiatives that we work, we have to work through in this economic state is also one of the key challenges for many CIOs in this sector. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

So then Suma, how do you prioritize digital initiatives within a resource constrained environment like health?

I mean, how do you line up that tech strategy with the overall business strategy -? you mentioned earlier about the governance that you've got in place - is there anything else that you look at when you're prioritizing your digital initiatives. ? Suma Shivalingaiah?

Yes, we definitely have a prioritization model that we look at and we also look at the resource availability. So we've been able to establish a centralized tool where we monitor all of the initiatives that come into ICT.

We work through something which is called an enterprise design authority to make sure that, you know, we can look at proper solutions. They go through the IT principles which are assessed.

And also we look at the resource capacity, if we have the capacity to deliver these type of initiatives that we are getting through the frontline or the front door.

So these are some of the things that we look at to then measure when can we do this critical piece of work versus, you know, do we need additional help or support from recruitment for other resources? And then we embark on that journey to manage that.

So from a governance perspective, we have a centralized tool that manages that, and with reporting, we can actually look at how much workload we can take on on board.

We are still improving in this space, but at the moment, with the defined roadmap, we prioritize initiatives along with the new critical initiatives which come from the business, so that that way, we can manage our existing resources and not overload them with a lot of initiatives that are coming through.

So that's how we kind of have that balance. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

And then finally, what's important to you in the months ahead? Any other exciting initiatives in the pipeline? ? Suma Shivalingaiah?

Months ahead, there are many exciting initiatives in the pipeline. We're looking at our cloud migration strategy. We are looking at AI use cases in AI and also optimizing some of our existing manual workflows and automating them as well.

For me, it's important to upskill our team, so I'm more of an action oriented person, so I like to get involved, and I love skip level meetings to understand what is happening within the team.

We want to invest in our people, so we want to train them, give them more opportunities to learn and grow in their teams and in their careers as well.

I'm also a mentor within RMIT and Monash, especially around getting more women into technology is also one of the things that I'm quite keen in understanding and promoting as well.

So basically, want to roll out more and modern technologies within Eastern Health to support our goal of healthier together. So that's my key focus. ? Cathy O'Sullivan?

Well, I look forward to catching up with you in the months ahead and hearing about those initiatives, and especially that laudable goal of getting more women into technology. We definitely need more women in technology.

Suma Shivalingaiah, Chief Information Officer at Eastern Health, thank you so much for your time and insights today. ? Suma Shivalingaiah? Thank you, Cathy.