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TRANSLATE TECHNOLOGY VALUE
INTO BUSINESS VALUE.
DONE.
Dr. Mary Hall Gregg: The most important thing is that you live the business. It’s not enough to study it
and learn it, but you have to at some point in your career have actually lived it.
I’m Mary Hall Gregg, and I’m the Chief Information Officer and Vice President for Quest Diagnostics.
As a CIO, you’ve got to know things end to end. You’ve got to connect with your team and with the
people who you’re solving problems for. I like to lead. I like to be in the middle of things. Love sci-fi.
The Chief Information Officer on the Starship Enterprise? It would probably be Mr. Data. He knows
everything about the ship end to end, how it works, how it functions, solves problems.
You do have to speak two different languages and you have to understand the technology and how
it’s going to create the value, but you have to be able to translate that to real terms and specific to
your business and your industry. Along the
way I had an opportunity actually leave the
IT organization and go to work for our IT
subsidiary, MedPlus.
I got to know our sales organization, understand their challenges and what they needed to be
successful, but most importantly, I got to spend time with our customers.
Access to information is so important in the treatment of patients and the delivery of care. So making
sure that physicians have the information when they need it at the point of care is key. Care360 is really
our premier product for physician offices, and it’s how physicians send us orders electronically and
how we send results back to them. So not only have we provided a tool that the physician can use, but
they can also now print this and give this to the patient.
We are trying to create an even better culture in IT around innovation and growth, getting people out in
front of our customers, studying industry trends, learning the technology, and then how to bring all of
those things together.
Well even before we know for sure, we’re going to do something. We’re thinking about how we’re going
to actually execute it, both from an IT perspective, but we’re also engaging our business partners on
what their role is going to be.
Helping people to visualize and understand the benefit and the value creation of doing it, the first
inclination is to sit and write all the technology benefits and why we need to do this, and that’s a great
start, but the next immediate thing we do is take what those technology benefits are and we translate
them into real business benefit.
The next thing we do, once we’ve articulated the business benefits is we look for ways to create vivid
demonstrations of the value.
Anybody who wants to be a CIO in today’s world, you have to experience what your customers
experience, what your sales team has experienced, what the folks in operations are experiencing,
because that is what gives you credibility. I never really had an aspiration to be a CIO. I wanted to do
something where I could make a difference, and now I’m CIO, and I love it.
“THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS
THAT YOU LIVE THE BUSINESS.”