My personal opinion as a customer, GE is currently awful at supporting their SW. They require extremely specific builds under "FDA regulations" that only limit vendors from patching rather than customers (I.E. they certified SQL Server 2005, it is 2015 and you want to run SQL 20012? Nope, we don't support that even though the legislation says customers are allowed to update base systems). If a GE cloud goes live we can expect to be deploying HIPAA compliant applications on SQL 2012 in 2019 based on current "certification" requirements.

Further, they are already big enough to espouse a "my way or the highway" attitude around their medical products. They may try to use that as leverage to force huge organizations into the cloud, but quite frankly, HIPAA is scalable legislation and no cloud solution to my knowledge has met huge organization requirements for audit trails on data center entry and physical access.

So, go ahead and push this agenda GE... It may finally be the one thing that finally causes the big players to break your medical divisions back.

Around a decade ago I was working as a project DBA for a very large US bank. Given a certain level of trust I ended up assigned to almost all of the InfoSec related projects including fraud detection. So, I was responsible for writing all of the database back end for this system which included a web based front end that allowed the analysts to enter their own rules as to how to flag transactions. I was pretty proud of the work.

Fast forward a decade. That bank was deeply involved in the mortgage crisis and is now owned by yet another bank. I work remotely for my current US employer from Brazil. But, I still have the old employee banking account from all those years ago. Roughly once or twice a month my own code flags my transactions as fraudulent and locks my card. The irony isn't lost on me. I consider it somewhat like an early teen, rebellious against the hand that feeds.

Full disclosure: I’m a CTO for a large state university healthcare system with a masters degree and 19 certifications. (16ish still active)

I would counter this question with a couple more. What size of IT do you want to work in? The requirements for degrees and certifications go up as you get into larger and larger shops. Are you thinking of the future IT landscape? Like it or not the pervasiveness of the cloud will make IT more competitive in the future as organizations begin to rely more on analysts with specific skill sets (and certifications in them) and project managers while deferring operational roles to cloud providers (or reducing staff somewhat with private/hybrid clouds).

My main point being that in the coming decade we will all need to be more competitive because there will very likely be a reduction in the necessary IT workforce. Certifications are one of the methods to achieve that.

We are also serving multiple masters now. The days of monolithic IT departments that cut their own swath through the business are pretty much at an end. IT has to become a part of the business strategy working as a partner to increase revenue. Yes, experience will always be king on a resume. But IT departments will fall in line with the normal degree requirements and post educational requirements already existent in other departments. IT managers will be able to make the case for that occasional “special” hire. But it quickly grows very tiring fighting with HR for every open position because candidates don’t have the organizational requirements. Plus, there are enough candidates that you can afford to toss a really good resume to avoid the fight. You’re not trying to get through the HR automated filters anymore; those filters have become organizational institutions.

Based on the background in the OP third paragraph I’d really recommend looking at project management certifications (good) and possible a masters degree (better). The PMP from the project management institute is very well respected but is based on the waterfall approach and may not be relevant to some IT shops. There are agile certifications out there as well (including one from PMI) that may be better suited and more interesting to you.