This month, BCS sits down with our new Vice President, Information Technology, Wendell Ferguson. Wendell joined BCS in May, and has hit the ground running ever since. He took a break from his busy schedule to give us a peek into his first few months at BCS, his priorities for the department, and his first impressions of the company.
Q: Describe your/your team’s role at BCS, and what a typical day looks like.
A: We provide technology support and solutions to enable our business short and long-term success. As for a typical day, for now, I’m getting to know the lay of the land while supporting my talented team as they kick butt keeping the lights on and pushing to modernize our systems.
Q: What was your first impression of BCS?
A: Wow, what a great group of people!
Q: What are your IT priorities for BCS this year?
A: Keep BCS secured, support our business partners to get the solutions they need to further expand our business, and as we do so work on completing our system modernization project.
Q: What influenced you to get into technology?
A: I was an Electrical Engineering major in my freshman year of college (1990), and I needed to write a paper for an English class. I used a personal computer (PC) for the first time, fell in love with it and changed my major to computer science the very next semester.
Q: What is one IT challenge that keeps you up at night?
A: There is nothing at BCS that currently keeps me up at night, we have a stable and secure system and that is a really good thing. Security is a big deal these days and our team handles it well. The biggest IT challenge facing healthcare in my opinion is being able to support and make real-time health decisions, and having the platforms to support the capability. Those decisions are data driven and data is not always accessible. In fact, the data is usually stored on multiple disparate platforms. Additionally, there are a lot of rules on how data should be protected and governed, which adds additional complexities. So, we have a lot of work to do in the data space and quite frankly it is actually more of a business challenge than an IT challenge.
