Mayo Clinic – “We have the right goals, we just need to figure out how to accomplish them.”

Pros

Mayo Clinic has very good work life balance. Mayo's focus is on providing excellent patient care and has built a strong reputation based on the integrated clinical practice, medical education, and medical research. It is very satisfying to work for a company that is clearly making a positive difference for mayo people's lives.

Cons

Mayo, from an IT/IS perspective has some big problems and frustrations. First, our failure rate on projects is much higher than it should be. There are many reasons for this. One is the strict requirements from a development point of view. Mayo has an IT standard called the Target Technical Architecture (TTA). The goal of the TTA is to provide a uniform, consistent IT infrastructure across this organization, a nobel goal. But what it really does is lock us into a set of tools that is out of date, and not optimal for the problems we are trying to solve. This makes work tedious and boring and redundant. When you know there are better solutions, but you are not allowed to use them, it can be very demoralizing. I think it also stifles creativity.
Another problem is that Mayo's IT infrastructure lacks a good project management and testing group for IT projects.
One of the most frustrating and demoralizing decisions recently is that all IT staff at Mayo are going to be required to wear business formal. For many of us with no direct patient contact, this makes no sense. It is going to make work more uncomfortable for many of us. Its also expensive for us to have to go out and buy a fancy wardrobe.

Advice to Senior Management

Realize that IT is central to the success of the business. Building the business knowledge and incorporating it into solutions is a complex task. You need to build integrated IT teams similar to the integrated clinical teams that Mayo is built on. The organization, management, and analysis of data at Mayo is too important to hand off to vendors. You need the experts on-site who can put these solutions together and maintain them.