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IT LEADER SPOTLIGHT

JD Whitlock - Dayton Childrens
CIO

1. What was your first job?

Paperboy when I was 13. Woke up at
6am in blizzards in upstate NY to deliver
your morning paper on my bicycle. Went
through a lot of rusted out bicycles. And I
put the newspaper inside your storm door,
didn’t just throw it in the bushes from the
sidewalk. Customer service!
2. Tell us about your career path.

Started out in the Navy driving ships around
the Pacific and Middle East and Caribbean, then switched to healthcare
administration in the Air Force, and got into healthcare IT from there.
YOUR MISSION IS CRITICAL.
3. What are the CEO’s top priorities for you in the THAT’S ALL WE THINK ABOUT.
coming year? How do you plan to support the
business with IT? Your mission depends on data and computing power being available without fail.
Vertiv, formerly Emerson Network Power, has a laser focus on delivering vital, innovative
and intelligent applications for high-tech environments. We create value for our customers
We have a crack team of visionary Execs, the entire C-suite, that push by making your critical mission our own. YOUR VISION, OUR PASSION
hard on IT to deliver transformative capabilities for our providers, nurses, Liebert® Trellis™
patients, and of course in our special case as a children’s hospital, the
families of our patients. Dayton Children’s has had significant growth in Represented locally by Uptime Solutions
www.uptime-inc.com
the last couple years (new patient tower with a lot of new IT capability) so 937-237-3400
the focus this year in IT is on a better support model for the wide variety
of new applications added in the last couple years, while still doing a
double-upgrade to our Epic electronic health record (EHR) in November,

and a significant expansion of our WorkDay ERP into supply chain in the Meet your challenges
spring. Also tossing in a transition to O365 and several other new clinical
applications just for fun. My Air Force analogy for this year is that we are when they’re
easing off the supersonic afterburner (we don’t build new patient towers
every year) and now we need to keep cruising at 500mph and innovating still opportunities.
while implementing a better support model for all the applications we
added recently.
4. What advice would you give to aspiring IT leaders? RSM and our global network of

One of the many great things about working in IT is that there are both consultants specialize in working with
supervisory and individual contributor paths to career progression, a dynamic, growing companies. This focus
bigger paycheck, and hopefully some simultaneous net positive effect on leads to custom insights designed to
the universe. Let’s face it, the personality characteristics that make great meet your specific challenges. Our
geeks do not always also make good bosses. We all know IT leaders that experience, combined with yours, helps
got promoted because they were smart and stuck around, but probably you move forward with confidence to
should have focused on honing their coding skills in a dark room rather reach even higher goals.
than trying to supervise other human beings. So take a deep breath and
ask yourself where your strengths lie. If you want to be a leader of people rsmus.com/technology
in addition to a leader of technology, great, go get an MBA, and realize you
may need to switch employers a few times to find the right progression of
supervisory roles. On the other hand, if you are a super-geek, embrace that,
and go deep with data science or cybersecurity or whatever floats your
boat. That is one of the many awesome things about working in IT – you
can make a good living as an individual contributor. Of course if you want
to make more coin as an individual contributor you have to be smart about
where the technology AND industry are headed. Don’t bother getting
smart on something that AI will do well in 5 years. I am available for career
counseling on this topic for the small price of buying me a beer at Lock 27 RSM US LLP is the U.S. member firm of RSM International, a global network of independent audit, tax and consulting firms.
or an Old Fashioned at The Century Bar after work. Just look me up Visit rsmus.com/aboutus for more information regarding RSM US LLP and RSM International.
on LinkedIn.
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Technology First | October 2018