How Closely Is Your Pay Linked to Real IT Success?

A recent article in The Boston Globe sparked my interest in just how closely CIOs’ pay (regular salary and bonus) was linked to quantifiable metrics that related to IT success. I’m not talking about if the CEO and other senior management thought the CIO was doing “a good job.” I’m talking hard numbers that directly correlate to hard dollars.

First, the Globe article. In it, writer Christopher Rowland detailed how some hospitals in the Boston area have tied their CEOs’ bonuses to critical safety issues. “Hospitals have traditionally rewarded chief executives for their ability to attract patients and make money,” Rowland writes. “But now more are linking a portion of executives' pay to a range of safety measures, from reducing medication errors to monitoring how often doctors wash their hands.”

This isn’t chump change here. “Chief executives at Boston's academic medical centers earn more than $1 million a year in salaries and bonuses,” Rowland writes. In his research, he found that “about half of the nation's nonprofit hospital chiefs, including several in Boston, do not receive full bonuses unless they meet incentive goals...including finding ways to double-check patient identifications, track tissue speci mens, make sure test results are not lost, and cross-check medications.”

That led me to consider if CIOs (and not just in health care) are also being held to similar fact-based and data-intensive standards. For example, because network and application availability and data- and device-loss prevention are so critical to so many organizations right now, is it not reasonable to hold the CIO accountable for those areas--if employees are losing BlackBerrys or laptops at an alarming clip or financial applications are going down at the end of every quarter when the finance department has to have them up, then should the CIO’s pay be negatively affected?

So I got on the phone with John Halamka, who’s the CIO of Harvard Medical School and CareGroup (the hospital system that runs Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston), and also an MD. I asked him if it would be a good idea to implement a similar system, with lots of direct accountability, for CIOs.

From his Prius, as he was circumnavigating Boston’s traffic snarls, he told me that this is exactly how has been evaluated for his bonus for the last four or five years. In fact, it was a disastrous network outage

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