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.
Well, I finally jumped on the band wagon. I have a blog.
For a month or so now I’ve been thinking about it. Thinking about the thoughts I wanted to share. About the time I don’t have to devote to a blog. About how a blog fits into my professional development and my work. I’ve decided its time.
I’ve been working at NPower Pennsylvania for over a year and a half now. NPower PA is a non-profit consulting company in Philadelphia. We work only with other non-profits and help them use technology to achieve their mission — our somewhat cheesy tagline is “Your Mission, Our Technology.” I started doing IT consulting — fixing servers and networking equipment, checking backups, reinstall windows, etc — but I’ve moved on to technology planning, requirements and business analysis, training, and just about anything else people related.
Non-profits are curious beasts. They are both like (not that many like to admit it) and unlike their for-profit counterparts. They are often driven by a toxic mess of politics, fundraising, personal missions, and alcohol. And their relationship with technology is complex. Something about non-profit organizations’ unwillingness to adapt or change and their conflicting propensity to adopt novel and forward thinking programs raises tremendous challenges for their often outdated infrastructure.
And that is really what has driven the development of my personal mission. I want to help non-profits (and other public service organizations) use technology in ways that support their mission. I want to help them use technology not just as an operational tool but as a force for transformation within their organization. Technology drives business and business drives technology, and its time non-profits woke up and realized that fact. I don’t want to just help these organizations get new servers, new workstations, and new databases; I want to help them fundamentally change the way they think about and plan for technology.
On this blog I’ll share some of my experiences with non-profits. Some of my hair brained ideas. Some of my wild aspirations. By writing these things down I hope to further hone my understanding of the non-profit world and possibly give someone else a glimpse into the sector.