Technology for your Mission

I like to take a holistic approach to technology. Technology isn’t just the servers and desktops — it’s the software, it’s the databases, the website, the people, the processes, the training, and so on. This isn’t exactly a new idea, but it is one I’ve taken to heart.

Actually looking at technology in this way is difficult. The human mind isn’t particularly good at viewing things as a whole, it has a (usually beneficial) tendency to categorize and break problems down. This is exacerbated by the complexity of Information Systems; it is impossible for any one individual to have detailed subject knowledge about every aspect.

The trick is to cheat. Instead of looking at the system as a whole and then break it down, look at the components, put everything together, and plaster over the cracks. At NPower, we use The House. It’s a little ridiculous, but it works. What is part of the house and what we call each section changes project to project depending on the scope, but the idea remains the same. When doing a strategic technology plan or technology audit we address each part of the house separately through interviews and on-site investigation. As part of this process we examine the interaction between each of these pieces. Finally, everyone comes together to discuss and recommendations informed by the whole are made.

This last part is the most important, and the most difficult. The ability to synthesize massive amounts of information and dozens, sometimes hundreds, of seemingly unrelated gaps is difficult to learn. It requires as much business acumen as technical know-how. What emerges isn’t technical recommendations; it is the huge, business altering ideas. At NPower PA we call them Strategic Initiatives, they are ideas that fundamentally change how you think about technology. Strategic Initiatives are the top-down approach to Information Systems.

In today’s world this top-down approach is crucial. We can’t afford to think of an Information System as discrete components. Take a look at the picture in this post. It’s been making the rounds recently, and is a drawing of the first steamboat (it didn’t work very well). It is intended to illustrate that simply adding technology to a current system or process (like emailing out a pdf copy of a newsletter) fails to fully grasp the potential of technology. Doing so is the bottom-up approach.

Strategic and transformative ideas are the paddle boats. They shift the question from fixing problems through technology to creating new opportunities. Things like websites that integrate internal data sources, online communities, social networking, problem-based learning, open api’s, and open source software all illustrate this concept. Start with what technology can do and then decide how it can help your organization.

Not just anyone can do this. The individual looking for these opportunities needs a somewhat technical background, needs to have excellent management skills, and needs the ability to be both detail and big-picture oriented. And they need to be within the organization, at the level of senior management. Only by having someone inside and invested in an organization, and having the decision making capabilities of senior management can understand the organization and be as proactive as necessary. The solution, unsurprisingly, is to hire a Chief Information Officer.

If your organization can’t afford such an individual, there is always the option to hire a consultant, or to educate senior management about technology. Of course, the unique combination of skills that makes a good CIO are impossible to replicate by non-technical individuals or individuals who aren’t personally invested in the organization.

Yesterday I attended HigherEdCamp Philly. This unconference (structured as a bar camp) brought individuals together to talk about technology in education. The primary focus was, not surprisingly, Web 2.0 (a term I am somewhat tired of hearing).

I attended for two reasons. The first is that institutes of higher learning often face the same issues that non-profits do. They can be slow to change, and often have an institutionalized fear of new technologies. They are also mission focused and dedicated to helping their clients (students). The second reason is that I have toyed with entering higher education at some point later in life. Either by getting my Ph.D. and teaching or by entering the administration and staff.

I’ll be writing more about what I learned at the conference, but I wanted to share a few of the things that really stood out to me. I’m copying these straight from my notebook — they are unstructured, inconsistent, and may make no sense to anyone else. However, I still think a few of them are interesting and sometimes raw ideas are the most thought provoking.

• What can IT/Infrastructure learn from web design? 
  • EX
  • user-centric
  • cyclical design
  • flexible / innovative

• What can web learn from IT/Infrastructure?
  • Formalized process
  • Excelent project management processes
  • Well established metrics

• Top down doesn’t work. It may be inefficient but buyin starts from the bottom.

• Don’t just support the mission — empower the individual

• Technology is working to mitigate specialization of labor through information accessibility — everyone can be an expert. Maybe not enough to do the work, but enough to take professionals off their pedestal and help consumers engadge.

• The switch to a service based economy is a metaphor for open source software — the tools and raw material are available to everyone, but you still have to pay for the expertise to put it all together into something useful. OSS developers sell a service not a product.

• Technology is allowing us to achieve the better teaching methods (problem-based learning, etc) psychologists have been telling us about for year. We need to harness it better.

• It’s impossible to really test huge systems that transform the very way we interact (example: blackboard, facebook) in any quantifiable way. Instead we need to find really subject-specific applications and test them with hard metrics. Do this a couple hundred times, generalize common results, and apply the lessons learned to the system as a whole. This could apply to large infrastructure projects too.

• Education is now similar to open source. Everyone has access to the raw materials and information, but we still need the experts to facilitate the process and teach us how to do something with it.

Fundraising for technology really isn’t such a mystery. Follow a few simple rules and you are likely to succeed:

• Relate it to your mission
• Talk about the project in client-centric ways
• Have a clear plan for implementation
• Set aside money for long term maintenance
• Get recommendations from a professional
• State it as a capital investment

This last is the subject of today’s post. Non-profits need to make it clear that any external funding will be supported down the line by operational costs that are provided by stable revenue streams. This isn’t particularly difficult to do with “traditional” technology projects. It costs $X to design a website, $X to buy and install a file server, $X to purchase and customize an off-the-shelf database solution. Long term support and maintenance for the entire infrastructure is generally a tiny percentage of implementation costs and, in my experience, represents less than or about equal to 5% of the organization’s budget.

But “traditional” technology isn’t what nonprofits need. They need on-demand computing. They need services based in the cloud. The need databases that are customized as needed and sold as a service. They need to be as agile and connected as possible. SaaS, cloud computing, and similar consumption based services are the future. The problem is, they make capital investments operational costs. This is great for for-profit enterprises. Spreading large costs over a number of years has obvious benefits when you are paying for it yourself anyway. But the same does not hold true for non-profit organizations.

Donors just don’t won’t to fund operational, long term, costs. From their perspective it makes perfect sense — even a nonprofit organization should be self sufficient. Money should be reserved for increasing the reach and breadth of services offered, not for paying for office supplies and basic support. SaaS often does help organizations achieve their mission and increase services — and it can do it at a lower cost and with greater efficacy — but how can we communicate this change with investors?

And even if we can convince investors, the perceived risks of moving to a hosted solution may prevent nonprofits from doing so. After all, capital investments can be seen as more flexible. A server can limp along for five or six years after its scheduled replacement date, and support can (and, trust me, is) easily dispensed with in tough economic times. On the other hand, hosted systems have definite expiration dates. The amount of money may be the same either way, but up-front costs are often more attractive to the risk-wary non-profit.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but it is clear that education must begin soon if non-profits are going to jump on-board with the reliability, cost, and efficacy benefits SaaS can provide. We need to work with funders to help them understand the risks and benefits of a new kind of computing.

A coworker of mine likes to say that clients pay consultants to tell them what they already know. I would agree, with one small change. Clients pay us to help them understand what they already know.

Our clients already know they need a new server. They already know their database isn’t tracking the data they need. They know no one is visiting their website. But they don’t understand it. They don’t know why, and they certainly don’t know how to go about fixing it. And frankly, telling them what they need to do in the form of a document isn’t going to help.

A few years ago I volunteered at a community center in west Philadelphia. There I taught basic computer skills to under-privileged adults as part of job training. If there was one thing I learned, it was that having them memorize a set of steps to save, or print, or italicize, just wasn’t helpful. As soon as something went wrong, they were out of luck. Instead, I had to teach them the process. Explain context menus, tool bars, contextual editing. I had to teach them how a computer worked. Only with this knowledge could they figure things out on their own. Not that I was particularly good at it, teaching this kind of thing proved very very difficult.

Creating a Strategic Technology Plan is no different. You can explain the steps needed to gather requirements and implement a database as much as you want, but it isn’t going to do them any good. You have to help them understand the process, the reasons for doing things in a particular way. They have to understand how metrics drive fund raising drives implementation projects. They need to understand why long term budgeting is important.

The deliverable is a piece of paper that will be shown to the board once and put on a shelf. The valuable part is the lesson. This is what our clients pay us for.