“Our Web site sucks”
If you manage or are otherwise responsible for your organization’s Web site, I’m sure you’ve heard that more than once. I used to hear it at Aurora all the time. I’d get off the phone with a colleague from another hospital or health system who was just gushing about the site and asking how on earth we did all that, and somebody would darken my door to tell me right to my face how bad our site was.
Does anybody go to the head of Finance and tell him “the budget sucks”? I doubt it.
It’s an interesting phenomenon. I’m sure many of these same people go to the symphony. Do they go home thinking they can write or perform one? But I had one manager tell me that she was an expert on Web sites because she got a degree in Nuclear Engineering. “We were on computers all the time,” was her explanation. I probably shouldn’t have laughed, but I thought she was joking.
All of this is intended to explain why some of us in the industry are so taken with the various awards programs. Double-digit ROI is not always enough to get people to understand that what you are doing is “best in class.” Sometimes it takes that outside validation to confirm that your work is at least above average. Or at minimum, it doesn’t suck!
So congrats to all the winners of the eHealthcare Leadership Awards, the Greystone.Net Best in Class Awards, and any other awards program you happen to follow. You know it, and I hope your staff knows it. Now the world should know that you are doing good work!