management – Page 3 – Techcafeteria

The ROI on Flexibility

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?"

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Balancing Act

February 13, 2009 Peter Campbell

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NPTech, Recommended Posts

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.

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Help for the Helpers

January 20, 2009 Peter Campbell

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NPTech, Recommended Posts, Technology

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.

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Keys to the Kingdom

December 17, 2008 Peter Campbell

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NPTech, Recommended Posts

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.

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Managing by Maxim

December 7, 2008 Peter Campbell

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NPTech

I'm a big fan of maxims, adages, anything that sums up an important, and possibly complex point in a sentence that can convey, if not the whole point, at least a conversation starter. The main challenge for a technology manager is communication, particularly with those who are uninterested and/or threatened by technological terms. I live and breathe this stuff, but I understand that I'm in the ten percent, the ten percent of people who like and are completely comfortable with technology. The rest of the world ranges from averse to highly competent, but not gaga over it all, like I am. Remembering that, and approaching each project and decision with that in mind, has helped me accomplish significant things for people who aren't necessarily bought in to all of my ideas on first listen.

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