Barcelona, Email and Opportunity

I'm back from vacation. Barcelona is a very cool city! The food, people, art and architecture are all a wonderful experience. We also stayed in Cadaques, a small coastal town in northeast Spain that still has a small working fishing fleet and also mostly caters to tourists. The quiet and peace were a stark contract to busy Barcelona! We also spent the night under Montserrat in Montistrol de Montserrat, a small village under the steep mountain atop which a monastery was built long ago. Montistrol was a taste of typical Catalan village life with people walking their dogs, a horse drawn cart still in use, pick-up games at the village football pitch and a cafe/bar in the town center that is filled to the gills after 7PM on a Thursday night. I loved Catalonia.

Now I'm back, refreshed and relaxed and cranking through several hundred emails. My task list is brimming with new assignments received while I was away. Fortunately I'm blessed with a wonderful team of folks who can tackle nearly anything that comes their way. Currently one of my team members is out of office preparing to have her second baby. There are three interim managers, one from one of her teams, our manager of systems architecture and another from an applications team, who are filling in. All of them are doing a great job and the opportunity to bring a different point of view to some of the challenges we face has been enlightening. We wish our colleague a happy and healthy birth and look forward to her return.

Many of the new assignments have related to the financial situation faced by so many people around the world. As we collaborate with our executive leadership to ensure the future of our ministry the challenges that we face occasionally feel daunting. Every challenge hides an opportunity however.

Our endeavors to improve the quality of our development application portfolio will now naturally align and be pulled along by the mandate that more scrutiny is applied to projects that do not fall into the purview of IT Governance. This will result in more opportunities to collaborate with our customers and ultimately optimize the value that our web development squad provides to the ministry. The need to report out and improve patient care quality measures will help drive a shift and transition away from old school operational reporting towards the delivery of pro-active data that allows hospital staff to step away from data-entry and spend more time on improving outcomes. The necessary slowdown of operational budget growth will reduce the overall number of discretionary projects on our plate during a period where we have at least four major infrastructure and application upgrade initiatives that are key to preventing the decay of our production environment. The need for great ideas to reduce overhead and generate revenue will provide opportunities to pilot and roll out low cost/high yield idea generation and implementation techniques that will provide scores of opportunities for long term incremental improvements in efficiency.

The list goes on and on. In times like this I reflect on the amazingly talented colleagues I work with each day and my anxiety evaporates because I know we will weather the storm and emerge stronger than ever.