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James Kimmey, M.D., became the University's executive vice president in May of this year following a restructuring of the senior administration. Grand Connections recently discussed with Kimmey his new position at the University.
GC: Explain your role at the University. Why was the position created?
Kimmey: The position of executive vice president has a long history at Saint Louis University, but it has undergone changes over time. Fr. [Jerome] Marchetti really defined the position during Fr. [Paul] Reinert's presidency, carrying responsibility for day-to-day operations of the institution. When Fr. Biondi decided to re-institute the position after several years absence from the organizational chart, Dr. Alice Hayes was recruited and asked that the title provost be added to executive vice president. That combination was maintained through Dr. [Richard] Breslin's tenure. The splitting of the position into an executive vice president (chief operating officer) and a provost (chief academic officer) at this point in the history of the University reflects two factors: the increasing complexity of the University's business operations and a desire to give more visibility and attention to our core activity, academics. The executive vice president is responsible for supervising University operations, including the departments responsible for finance, planning, legal services, human resources management, facilities services and civic affairs, and development and university relations. These services exist to support effective achievement of the University's fundamental educational and research missions. As we move into a new millennium, and toward the president's vision of Saint Louis University as the nation's premier Catholic institution of higher education, these activities must be carried out in a way that promotes maximum efficiency and minimum bureaucracy.
GC: How do you see your role in working with University President Lawrence Biondi, SJ, and Provost Sandra Johnson?
Kimmey: The president has strong feelings about most issues that affect the University and likes to be personally involved in their resolution. At the same time, his schedule and the particular responsibility he bears for securing financial resources for realizing his vision requires a great deal of his time and attention. By dividing the ongoing responsibility for operations and academics between two senior administrators, he aims to assure that all aspects of the University receive careful attention from his management team. In this structure, coordination and cooperation are essential to success, and require open and continuous communication among the president, executive vice president and provost. To that end, regular meetings are held to assure that operations and academics are closely linked and that the support functions actually support the academic enterprise.
GC: What are the biggest challenges facing Saint Louis University?
Kimmey: The president has set forth the greatest challenge in his vision of Saint Louis University as the nation's finest Catholic university. That implies change, and coping with change is difficult for any large organization and the people who make it go. We begin with many positives: a clear sense of mission, dedicated faculty and staff, bright and inquiring students, an endowment that ranks in the top 40 in the nation, newly enhanced credit ratings and a newly revived campus in the heart of the city. We also have many areas of concern that must be addressed if we are to achieve the vision -- lagging information infrastructure; sub-optimal institutional communications, both internal and external; many bureaucratic procedures that have grown over time and don't serve the institution well; and the need to expand development efforts to support new initiatives. To move forward and upward, the University must practice what we teach -- critical analysis of both our core academic activity and the services that support it and adaptive changes that support our traditional excellence by applying non-traditional thinking to the way we operate.
GC: Faculty and staff members have heard a lot of talk about "re-engineering" lately. Fr. Biondi mentioned it during his State of the University address. There are a lot of misperceptions about what re-engineering really is and isn't. How do you define it?
Kimmey: There is a great deal of resistance in academe to the terminology and processes of the business world, and in this case I agree that "re-engineering" has the wrong connotation. It suggests a mechanistic, "by-the-numbers" approach to rethinking systems and operations. A better term for that which we hope to accomplish is "process improvement." Every complex organization has myriad processes that support its core activity. When these processes are designed to meet the needs of the people who carry them out rather than the needs of the people the organization serves, they are usually unsatisfactory to the latter group, inefficient and resource-consuming. In many areas of University operations there are policies and procedures that seem to have grown by accretion -- always adding requirements rather than seriously reviewing the value added for the institution from those that already exist. In process improvement, every step of every process is formally reviewed by those who carry it out and those who use it. The goal is to streamline operations and improve satisfaction on the part of users -- whether students, the public or other parts of the University.
GC: What will re-engineering, or "process improvement," mean for SLU? Does this mean employee layoffs?
Kimmey: Process improvement will mean greater satisfaction and increased efficiency in operations. Careful studies of the operations of the institution may show areas where too many people are involved in processing too much paper, but it also will identify areas where dissatisfaction and inefficiency are the result of too few people to produce results in a timely fashion. An effective response to such findings may mean retraining and cross training or changes in work for individuals, but, on balance, process improvement does not directly lead to layoffs.
GC: Saint Louis University Hospital was successfully re-engineered to assist with the recent sale to Tenet. What things can be learned from this that apply to the overall University?
Kimmey: Most people are aware of the financial pressures that have come to bear on the health care industry over the past decade. Institutions that identified the coming changes early and began to rethink the way they operated are the institutions that survive today and will survive tomorrow. Saint Louis University Hospital was one such institution, and began process improvement activities very early, instituting cross training, redesigning job content, adopting innovative scheduling approaches and taking other steps to assure a strong, competitive posture. As a result, when the market dictated that a partner be found for the future, the University received top dollar, assuring adequate support for health professions education into the future. The most important lessons learned included the importance of recognizing that professional activities such as health care (or academics) are not exempt from market pressures and must respond to survive and thrive; the absolute necessity of involving people who use services in efforts to improve them; the fact that those who perform tasks know more about those tasks and how to improve performance than anybody else; and the positive effect of improving processes on user satisfaction and on financial performance.
GC: One of your chief responsibilities will be University planning. Will the University's Strategic Plan, which drew some criticism while being developed two years ago, continue to be a document the University uses for guidance?
Kimmey: The current version of the Strategic Plan provides much that is valuable in terms of areas in which the University must invest to realize the president's vision of Saint Louis University as the finest Catholic university in the country. Defining strategy, however, is an ongoing process because the environment is constantly changing and those changes must be accommodated. We have a plan document, but no ongoing process to monitor the relevance of the document in a rapidly evolving higher education environment. Thus, the document's goals and objectives can be applied in decision-making only if each is reviewed in terms of current realities.
GC: Describe your leadership style.
Kimmey: Hire good people, provide a clear vision of the job to be done, and get out of the way! I believe that people are an institution's most important resource and that well-motivated and knowledgeable individuals will make good decisions and work hard when they understand the organization's mission and the role their particular job plays in its achievement. Management's task is to communicate that sense of mission, to demonstrate it in their own activities and, above all, to listen and respond to those who actually do the work.
GC: You've worked for years at leadership positions at the Health Sciences Center, but you are not as well known on the Frost campus. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and your family.
Kimmey: I'm always a bit surprised at this kind of question since it seemed to me that I spent a great deal of time on University activities over the past 11 years, but here goes. I am a Midwesterner, born and raised in Wisconsin, where I received my undergraduate education, a graduate degree in physiology and my medical degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I also have a master's in public health from the University of California at Berkeley. My career activities have included six years in the U.S. Public Health Service with postings in Washington, D.C., and New York City; a stint as executive director of the American Public Health Association; service on the staff of the governor of Wisconsin; and more than a decade in a non-profit consulting firm focused on assisting states and localities in health planning and policy development. For the past 11 years, I have been at SLU, first as director of the Center for Health Services Education and Research, then as dean of the School of Public Health and most recently as vice president for health sciences.
My wife Sarah and I recently celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary. We live in the Lafayette Square area of the city in a restored Victorian house and spend a great deal of time in a large perennial garden. We have two adult children. Our daughter Beth works in marketing in New Hampshire, and our son Jay is beginning his second year at SLU's School of Law. My major outside interests are choral music and St. Louis history. I am a member of the choir at Christ Church Cathedral in downtown St. Louis. I have written a history of our house which is in the collections of both the St. Louis Public Library and the Missouri Historical Society, as well as a monograph on research resources and tips for St. Louis real estate. At the time the University acquired O'Donnell Hall, I wrote a history of that classic building and its occupants over time.
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