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Have you both worked in other situations where the IT-business divide was very wide?
Sanger: I'll give you a great example. The whole reason that Bill [Tara] is here is that his predecessor was under the impression that IT was a world in and of itself. And the structure of decision making was not governance-related. The applications of technology were not balanced with the business needs. I've worked in too many organizations where that was problematic. I never tolerate IT executive leadership that doesn't have a strong business background, business acumen and a business bent toward decision making.
Tara: It's almost a function of a management culture. Not to be too soft and squishy -- but one of the things Bill [Sanger] brought to AMR is a culture of strong accountability and collaboration. One of the project management pitfalls that I have seen in my career is the lack of ability to focus complex initiatives -- people, process, technology -- and to divide those responsibilities up so that you know who is accountable for what.
Still, have you disagreed on anything very important?
Tara: I think we disagreed many times. Bill has to have somewhat of a slant toward the IT side of the equations. We can't become too much of a "yes" organization.
Sanger: I think that's very fair. We've made some tough tradeoffs as we have kind of moved forward. In all fairness, I don't think we've had a major disagreement about where to make those tradeoffs. One of the things that Bill and I talked about was how we can move off the whole data center architecture. We have about 20,000 EMTs and paramedics, who require 20 to 30 hours of training each year. There was a huge initiative to try to push that information out electronically. Yet the infrastructure was not ... we couldn't get there from where we were. We consciously agreed to defer those initiatives until we could get the network re-architected. We've done that in the last six months, and we're coming back to revisit it. Particularly for our HR folks, who really are invested in doing the right thing, I'll tell you it wasn't a decision they weren't real excited about.
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