An Approach for Planning Your Health Plan’s Strategic Application and Deployment of AI – Part 6
May 28, 2024
Once your team is confident of its validated findings and conclusions, it is time to report to your corporate sponsors/executives. While status is important against your budget and plan, the real interest will be your findings, conclusions, and assessment of your health plan’s current AI utilization.
Following this major milestone in your project, the next major task for your team is to provide AI strategy recommendations that will guide the broader enterprise modernization effort regarding the application and deployment of AI. These recommendations should be based upon the results of your work to date.
Your team may find that there is more than one way to approach applying and deploying AI based upon the information collected, so there may be several strategic options to consider. After definition and analysis of these strategic AI options evaluated by a set of criteria your team has prepared, a recommended AI option defining a strategy and direction represents the second major milestone in your assignment.
A review of your strategic AI options should be conducted with a group of executives who participated in your AI workshop as well as members of your corporate sponsor group for the overall modernization program. Arriving at a strategic option to recommend for inclusion in the enterprise modernization program is an extremely important deliverable as it will influence both the business and IT direction. Additionally, deployment of AI has other impacts around its management and governance which must be planned and implemented. Your recommendations could also include hiring resources with AI skills and experience, collaborating with third party vendors to build, deploy and maintain AI solutions, and/or engaging AI consultants.
As with the Workshop participants, plan for your team to spend time with the modernization program team educating, increasing AI awareness, and building consensus as your recommendations are reviewed and accepted.
The result of your effort should materially influence the direction of the enterprise modernization effort towards broader consideration of AI and become part of the broader initiative. For your IT organization, it should impact the timing for application of AI into the enterprise application and technology architectures.
With your strategic AI recommendations to corporate sponsors/executives and discussions with the broader modernization team underway or completed, the next phase of your project becomes in focus. There are several other tasks that you could be asked to complete or other outcomes that could result, such as:
• Your team is combined into the Enterprise Modernization Program to represent AI as a business and IT component that becomes part of the overall enterprise application and technology modernization plan
• Your team could be refocused to delve deeper into a component of AI. For example, you could be asked to complete further research on AI management and governance models, and associated costs and risk management and provide recommendations for creating this function in your health plan
• Your team could be asked to incorporate the consideration of AI when IT Governance evaluates requests for funding major application replacement projects. IT Governance should ask why AI is not part of the replacement solution if it is not included in the technology evaluation portion of the request for funding
In summary, any major multi-year Business and IT Modernization effort should not ignore artificial intelligence nor should any significant business process re-automation effort involving application and/or workflow system upgrades.
If you’d like to discuss our perspectives, our responses to the above questions for your organization, and our approach to strategic Enterprise AI, please contact us using the form below or at [email protected].