Technology for your Mission

I’ve written a great deal about various aspects of non-profit technology. As a result, I was surprised at the difficulty I had writing a more comprehensive article. In the end, I discovered that I needed to spend most of my time defining the non-profit and its mission. In fact, 80% of the article dealt with how non-profits work and only 20% actually involved technology. I suppose I’m not really surprised; I’ve long realized the importance of understanding how an organization works before attempting to implement anything related to technology.

The article, Technology and Non-Profits, begins with defining a non-profit and continues through non-profit funding sources and the non-profit culture. Then it discusses the importance of a mission-statement and techniques for  connecting technology projects to an organization’s mission. I think this is a good overview of the issues facing technology in non-profit organization.

Read it here.

These days at NPower I’m known as a Systems Analyst. I’m not really sure what that means (and I picked the title!). Let’s see what the internet has to say…

Princeton word net says it’s “a person skilled at systems analysis.” Well, that’s helpful, let’s try again…

Wikipedia says it’s “dealing with analysis of sets of interacting entities, the systems… and the interactions within those systems.” It also uses the word interdisciplinary a lot.

What this definition seems to say, and what my experience would suggest, is that Systems Analysts deal with just about everything that interacts with and within a system. That means that I figure out what needs to go into and out of the system (sort of requirements gathering), I figure out what the system is going to look like (architecture), and I make sure it gets done (project management). This is not likely to be a description that many agree with, but it fits my job pretty well.

What it doesn’t really capture is the importance of a facilitated, bi-directional, communication of knowledge to make this whole thing work. My job obviously requires that the developer understands what the user needs. But it also requires that the user understand why the developer has to design something in this way. Clearly I have to explain to the client that we can’t finish the project in two weeks, but I also have to explain to the developer that the client has a big due date coming up and needs this part of the system up and running by this date.

My job isn’t to be the wall between the two parties, taking information from one side and reworking it for the other. My job is to facilitate. And boy is it hard!

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.

Today I read an article in Wired, The New Socialism. While it has a misguided perception of Socialism as a historical movement — basically equating it to communism — it makes a powerful statement about the empowering force of technology. The article speaks of a world of open source software, of information freedom. Frankly, I feel that this OSS utopia is unrealistic, and I’m a little tired of hearing about it, but the fact remains that technology has blurred lines. It has opened information, giving rise to an particular brand of information socialism. Information is no longer just the purview of the elite, it is owned by everyone and created by everyone. At least everyone with enough money for a computer and an Internet connection.

It is important that the nonprofit world recognizes this change. The role of nonprofits as the single point of information and aid is dwindling. Instead, nonprofits need to shift to information brokers. We need to help our constituents communicate with each other. Our job is increasingly to facilitate communication — between individuals and the government, between individuals and other organizations, and particularly between individuals — and less to be content providers in our own right.

Obviously nonprofits must adapt their use of technology to meet this changing world, but the change must go deeper than that. Nonprofits must fundamentally change the way they think about their organization, their mission, and their clients. We must think about communication, marketing, outreach in an entirely new light. Technology isn’t the tool we need to use, it is the way we need to think. In today’s age, there is no difference between technology and communication, the Internet and outreach. 

Well, that was all a little (maybe more than a little) melodramatic. The world isn’t going to change overnight. Nonprofits still provide and will continue to provide very real and very needed services — homes need to be heated, children need an education, everyone needs to eat. Our prominent place in this nation’s social safety net isn’t going to change. But the approach is changing,  and we need to pay attention.

For further reading on the topic I recommend Here Comes Everyone, by Clay Shirkey.