Centene CIO Mark Brooks on building IT’s business relevance

Mark Brooks is executive vice president and CIO of Centene Corporation, a Fortune 24 multi-national healthcare enterprise. With executive responsibility for information technology and systems for the $125 billion company, Brooks leads a team of more than 4,000 employees who develop and implement software and services focused on the organization’s health plan members. In November of 2021, he was recognized with the St. Louis Leadership CIO of the Year ORBIE Award.

Centene has acquired 20 companies since its founding, including seven in the last five years, and Brooks’ Centene Technologies team has experienced dramatic growth as part of that process. He most recently led the successful technology integration of two $10+ billion health plans. When we spoke for my CIO Whisperers podcast, Brooks explained how a culture of “radical candor” has helped them navigate the scale and complexity of these integrations, particularly the people and talent dynamics, which can often be the most challenging.

Beyond the acquisitions, Brooks’ story is also instructive when it comes to making the business case for investment in IT to grow the team and increase its impact. Key to that, he said, is building capabilities into the team to bridge business needs and technology needs. After the show, we spent some time talking about what it takes for IT to get and keep its seat at the leadership table and why learning is fundamental to evolving the culture and delivering results. What follows is that off-air conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Dan Roberts: Can you talk about the process you went through to rebrand and also when and why a CXO should consider rebranding?

Mark Brooks: When we started together back in 2016, we were IT. And as the leadership team formed, it became clear that what we were trying to accomplish was much more than what IT implies—a service organization or a call center. We really wanted to be a strategic partner to our internal customers. We wanted to sit at the leadership table, help create strategy, generate outcomes. We wanted to really have a direct connection between the work that we did and, ultimately, the P&L.

So, as I mentioned on the podcast, we created business engagement teams—well-organized centers of excellence focused on the specific business processes that support the health plan. As part of our operating model, we selected those people so that they could engage with our business partners and start to build that brand and reputation. And as those things started to come together, the team, in a very thoughtful process, decided that Centene Technologies was really the descriptor that embodied the outcomes that we were trying to generate.