Idealware's blog is not the best place for me to talk about my kid. There's Facebook and Flickr for that sort of thing. But I want to talk about him anyway, and open a discussion, if possible, about children and the nptech community.
For the past four years or so, at two different organizations, I've been evaluating Microsoft's Sharepoint 2007 as a Portal/Intranet/Business Process Management solution. It's a hard thing to ignore, for numerous reasons:
At the recent Nonprofit Technology Conference, I attended a somewhat misleadingly titled session called "Cloud Computing: More than just IT plumbing in the sky". The cloud computing issues discussed were nothing like the things we blog about here (see Michelle's and my recent "SaaS Smackdown" posts). Instead, this session was really a dive into the challenges and benefits of publishing aggregated nonprofit metrics. Steve Wright of the Salesforce Foundation led the panel, along with Lucy Bernholz and Lalitha Vaidyanathan. The session was video-recorded; you can watch it here.
This article was originally published on the Idealware Blog in May of 2009. Photo by ferricide It’s been a big.
The technology trend that defines this decade is the movement towards open, pervasive computing. The Internet is at our jobs, in our homes, on our phones, TVs, gaming devices. We email and message everyone from our partners to our clients to our vendors to our kids. For technology managers, the real challenges are less in deploying the systems and software than they are in managing the overlap, be it the security issues all of this openness engenders, or the limitations of our legacy systems that don't interact well enough. But the toughest integration is not one between software or hardware systems, but, instead, the intersection of strategic computing and organizational culture.
Non Profit social media maven Beth Kanter blogged recently about starting up a residency at a large foundation, and finding herself in a stark transition from a consultant's home office to a corporate network. This sounds like a great opportunity for corporate culture shock. When your job is to download many of the latest tools and try new things on the web that might inform your strategy or make a good topic for your blog, encountering locked-down desktops and web filtering can be, well, annoying is probably way to soft a word. Beth reports that the IT Team was ready for her, guessing that they'd be installing at least 72 things for her during her nine month stay. My question to Beth was, "That's great - but are they just as accommodating to their full-time staff, or is flexibility reserved for visiting nptech dignitaries?"
My friends at Blackbaud referred me to this excellent post by Jay Love, CEO of ETapestry, once a small donor database service, now a subsidiary of the mother of all donor database companies. Jay's timely caution to nonprofits is that they be skeptical about all of the for-profit folk answering their employment ads in the face of the poor economy. People from that side of the dollar fence are generally unprepared for the culture of nonprofits. His story about vendors trying to break into our sector with no experience or research into our needs is fascinating. But I have a different take on hiring people from the for-profit world, and while Jay seems t be saying "don't do it", I'm on the "be sure to do it - in moderation" side.
If you're in a job that involves supporting technology in any fashion, from web designer to CIO, then the odds are that you do help desk. Formally or not, people come to you with the questions, the "how do I attach a file to my email?", the "what can I do? My screen is frozen", the "I saved my document but I don't know where". Rank doesn't spare you; openly admitting that you can do anything well with computers is equivalent to lifetime membership in the tech support club.
Being a career nonprofit IT type, I've repeatedly had the unpleasant experience of walking into a new job, only to find that critical information, such as software licenses and server passwords, are nowhere to be found. So before I can start to manage a new network, I have to hack it. This sort of thing happens in other industries as well, but it strikes me as something that plagues nonprofits.
I normally try to avoid being preachy, but this is too good a bandwagon to stay off of. If you make decisions about technology, at your organization, as a board member, or in your home, then you should decide to green your IT. This is socially beneficial action that you can take with all sorts of side benefits, such as cost savings and further efficiencies. And it's not so much of a new project to take on as it is a set of guidelines and practices to apply to your current plan. Even if my day job wasn't at an organization dedicated to defending our planet, I'd still be writing this post, I'm certain.
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