Understand the role that you are supporting (and its paradox)

To support your digital leader effectively, the board must first understand the modern, strategic nature of their role. A chief digital and information officer (CDIO) or digital leader is not simply a senior IT manager. Their role is fundamental to your organisational transformation.

The digital leadership at your trust may look different to your neighbour’s, but from our work with trusts, the CDIO holds accountability for strategy, finance, risk and system level leadership, while the chief clinical information officer (CCIO) provides the critical clinical bridge. Working together, they can ensure that technology is relevant, compliant, safe and designed around users. The reality for these leaders, however, is that they will be fighting a constant battle with deep rooted systemic challenges.

While they will be working to ensure you have the modern, secure and flexible technology your organisation needs, their day-to-day reality will be continually needing to tackle the wicked problems of lack of interoperability, the ‘technical debt’ of the many legacy systems and complex historic data, and the inevitable work-around processes that will be happening in day to day practice.

They will also need to navigate the organisational complexity of conflicting (and often changing) priorities, resistance to change, and the inevitable system politics. This will be compounded by stop-start funding cycles that make long-term strategic change hard, and a constant struggle to recruit and retain specialist talent in a highly competitive market.

This creates a paradox. When you hire your digital leader, you will be looking for someone with deep technology, data and user-centred design expertise, well-honed political skills, expert programme leadership, strong financial understanding, and a deep empathy for staff and patients. Adding to this, they will also need to be a strategic visionary. Very few people (if anyone) can be all of these things, so you will need to build the organisational scaffolding to support them. Their success is critical to your trust’s success.