Higher education doesn’t stop when someone hands you a diploma.

“I lead product development, so the types of people in our organization are project managers, business analysts and developers, and we take a very serious and very organized approach to education and professional development for our staff,” says Marty Paslick, Vice President, IT&S for Nashville-based Hospital Corporation of America. “We establish curriculums, we track their progress, and at the end of the year, aspects of my personal Performance Review are tied specifically to our accomplishments in the professional development area. So from the side of those in-house and getting them trained in the ways of how we like to do things, it’s a fairly big priority.”

From Paslick’s chair, he’s been able to see the radical changes IT departments have undergone over the past couple of decades, and he says that while specialization has changed the scope of what IT provides businesses, the need for practitioners with well-rounded business skills has never been more pronounced.

“When I was a developer in the mid-80s, we were the business analysts, project managers, developers, the QA team, and in some cases we were the implementers,” he says. “So what we’ve had is some specific careers that have emerged. There are careers that specialize in quality assurance. Three years ago, we didn’t have a dedicated QA area within HCA. Today we see that as a specialty that is essential. There’s a whole new set of professions dedicated to specialities such as project manangement and business analysis (Comments - We do not like to disclose the number of personnel dedicated to security for security reasons. Some individuals may interpret that as a challenge.)

“So specialization is removing aspects of what used to be the concept of a developer. I believe the low-level types of development activity like developing a screen that will accept data and append it to a database are not the types of activities we would like to see our staff dedicated ,” Paslick continues. “At HCA, we don’t have our best developers working on low level programming tasks. We have them working on creating frameworks on which our development occurs and conceptualizing how we can build enterprise services that can be called upon by a wide range of applications. There are lots of opportunities for us to build economies of scale within our development methodologies and the code we produce. In the end, we will have a product base that requires less maintenance and that is very flexibility to change.
Paslick, like many executives charged with the IT side of large businesses, finds the need for new talent with a broad-based knowledge and interest in all facets of businesses crucial, and the primary place for that new talent to be trained needs to be the college and university-level. “We need a better balance between the hard skills that have traditionally been taught and the soft skills that are a little harder to quantify,” he says. “I think people assume they are innate, and that you can’t learn to be a good listener or problem solver or build relationships. But, to me, those are the top three reasons why a project is successful or not successful. How much focus and class work do we dedicate to those skills at the higher education levels?

“Information technology is becoming more and more crucial to the success of a business. In the case of HCA, it sometimes the choice comes down between building a new emergency room for a hospital or building a new piece of a data warehouse. You can’t have those kinds of discussions and decisions unless you’re able to communicate in a language that business people can not only understand, but also articulate themselves,” Paslick says. “Those are the skills that have traditionally been absent from the IT side of the house. Today if you can’t find the people who can sit down and work with the business in a way that helps them understand, appreciate and make good decisions when it comes to technology, you’re in trouble.”


Lucas Hendrickson
Staff Writer