Community IT Innovators. Established 1993. Serving social mission organizations with integrated technology services you can trust.

The following article, by Washington Business Journal Associate Editor Timothy Burn, appeared in the December 11th, 2009 issue of the Washington Business Journal.

Exec helps nonprofits do more with technology

Like a true entrepreneur, Rob Jackson has used his career to identify a need and find ways to fill it. After spending some time at the See Forever Foundation/Maya Angelou Public Charter School, Jackson realized nonprofits need help making the best use of technology. Now he is vice president of business development for Community IT Innovators (CITI), where he helps nonprofits use technology to fulfill their social missions, and do it in a sustainable way.

What’s at the top of your ‘to do’ list?
First, build greater awareness for the strategic value of IT in social-mission organizations. Right now, IT is considered to be a cost center that plays several different tactical roles as opposed to a strategic business driver for the entire organization that requires an informed investment. That needs to change. Second, in order for IT providers like CITI to help social mission organizations make the transition into strategic IT, we need to spend more time talking about the organization’s business objectives with leadership. Third, build greater awareness internally among the staff about the business value of IT.

What’s the biggest challenge CITI clients face right?
Learning how to become more efficient in order to mitigate the well-publicized funding challenges. According to the Foundation Center, giving in 2009 will most likely finish down about 10 percent from 2008, and it’s expected to be down a little more in 2010. So, for the smaller organizations that we serve who have traditionally been asked to do more with less, it will be even more difficult to provide the administrative and professional services capabilities necessary to perform their work.

Many area nonprofits have had to tighten their belts. Has that hurt CITI’s business?
Our growth slowed earlier in the year, but we have been able to diversify our client base and identify new opportunities so that the effect of the downturn has not been catastrophic.

What do you think will be the next must-have IT capability for nonprofits?
With scarce resources and greater accountability standards, social-mission organizations will request information systems that can provide real-time, on-demand access to management information. So, defining the organization’s performance metrics, collecting the data, aggregating, analyzing and publishing the data using Web-based technologies is definitely going to be a must-have.

Can you explain CITI’s “triple bottom line” business model?
People. Planet. Profits. We measure the health and wellness of the organization by measuring individual goals, employee morale, and the company’s carbon footprint in additional to the traditional financials. Everyone at CITI has a coach (a CITI staff member) that helps define individual, quarterly goals that we track. These individual goals, team goals, business unit goals, and company goals get scored by our peers at the end of each quarter.

Your web site says CITI is employee-owned. How is that structured?
In an effort to ensure long-term success of CITI, the company established an employee stock ownership program. The impetus for this came from our staff who wanted to establish a participative, socially responsible, worker-ownership culture. So after one year of service, an employee becomes eligible for shares of company stock. The goal is to increase ESOP ownership and transfer up to 45 percent of the ownership to staff.

Seems like the nonprofit world is a finite market. Has CITI thought about how it can grow?
Ultimately, our growth is dependent upon our ability to leverage technology to make a significant impact for our clients. One way to grow is to serve more clients and play in a larger sandbox. This is possible, but the challenge becomes scaling our services so that we are providing consistently to a growing number of clients. Another way to grow is to provide more IT services to the clients we already have. This is also feasible, but then the challenge becomes offering technology services that are “just right” for the organization rather than being determined by an internal growth number. If we are successful in making a significant impact that dramatically accelerates the progress on our most urgent social issues, would our clients require more technology support or less?

“Business change is all about people.”  – We are really big fans of these words from Roger T. Burlton, an internationally recognized leader in business process change. He also expresses that business process changes must be managed holistically. We could not agree more.

Starting first with understanding where you are – what works, what is painful, what is stressful – establishes a baseline for the changes to make. In the discovery process we start exactly there, first understanding the “as is” picture and the people involved. It is important to draw on their wisdom on how things are, and are not, working. And then we work together to create a “to be” picture that involves changing the way some things are done. It is crucial to look at the priorities, and explore – can the organization use the technology already in place, in an improved manner (replacing the existing system is not always the answer)? Or maybe another solution is needed, and we look at how can that solution be integrated with back office systems (i.e. Accounting).

No matter what, as long as it is kept in mind that the change is all about the people (and the processes they use), there is hope for creating solutions that will make life easier for them, and help them focus on accomplishing what they do best.

People are an organization’s most important asset. We’ve all heard these words before. How is this translated really? Some leaders might say it’s the staff’s talents and special gifts, as well as experience, which are the asset. For some leaders, they appreciate that team members have the ability to learn and/or just simply follow instructions (which actually can go a long way to bringing about results).

In our interactions with various clients, whether they are local, national or international, and regardless of their mission, the value and reliance on highly talented people – and people who like to learn – is evident. It doesn’t stop there. There are some organizations which value their staff’s wisdom and find ways to draw on it authentically. This is something we highly support and encourage in our project approach.

Figuratively speaking, 90 – 95% of the answer to an organization’s problems, or desired innovations, is in the midst of the collective you – where the creativity and intelligence of multiple people across disciplines come together and do the hard work to find the answers. It sometimes requires having someone from the outside function as a source of creative tension and creative support for the group, and simultaneously provides a vital piece of missing expertise that helps complete the picture.

A lot of collective internal intelligence, with a little desire to ask for outside help, equates to the right synergy to find major answers. We know the synergy happens when we join with our clients in this way, and we have found ourselves in this place as well (we ask for outside help when we need it too).

Recently, several of us at CITI met with Paul King of Process Experts (and former CIO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). We knew there was a connection when we read his tagline, which reads “Integrating People, Process, & Technology,” which is a concept and the exact language we use at CITI in our own collateral material and conversations.

The conversation with Paul confirmed our notion that social mission organizations need an integrated, holistic, strategic approach to technology and that we should continue to offer our CITI as CIO approach to help organizations align their technology with their mission, make their existing operations more stable, and potentially reduce costs in the process.

At one point in the meeting, Paul said, “The biggest problem is that the people who know the technology are often brought in too late, rather than in the strategic planning phase.”

An organization’s leadership needs to be engaged in conversations and planning around technology.  A trusted technology adviser can help nonprofit leaders better understand how technology can solve their individual and organizational problems.

Another theme that came up in the conversation is the need for more information sharing and fewer silos both within an individual organization and between nonprofits. One real value-add that a CITI CIO could deliver is the cross-pollination and exchange of ideas, information, and best practices across nonprofits.  CITI serves as a community builder and connector, helping multiple organizations develop innovative solutions to common needs.

An article in the November 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review on Galvanizing Philanthropy speaks to the challenges philanthropic investors face when choosing between initiatives. In the article, the authors recommend a process of getting clear, getting real, and getting better to maximize impact, and they highlight some of the strategic decisions these investors face. Information technology wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the article (though data played a significant role), but IT can frequently be a catalyst and tool to demonstrably increase organizational effectiveness – and thus investments.

Paul King is a CIO who has been having this discussion with investors and we look forward to joining him!

Managing 3rd-party software implementations, including a new Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) system, fundraising system, member management system, or any software that your organization is paying big dollars to a vendor for, is an opportunity for creative tension and creative solutions. You’ll find that the vendor’s implementation schedule provides the activities that they as a vendor need done for the product to be implemented. However, from your organization’s perspective, the system is part of an overall new way of operating as an organization, including redesigning your business processes and changing the way people work for the desired outcomes your organization is expecting for investing in such systems.

You have probably heard the 80/20 rule on these projects:  80% of a project’s success will depend on how effectively staff and key stakeholders adopt the new systems and processes, and 20% depends on the actually technology. Intentional approaches to planning and change-for people and processes-are crucial to the success of any technology project.

Such projects are also an opportunity for organizational development. Changes in behavior, which means changes in the way people think, are required because the way people work is going to change (regardless of how much folks like the change or not). There are a host of implementation activities to plan for and engage people in, including data conversion and validation, integration with other systems, case scenarios, testing (with gumption and friendly accountability), training that incorporates the new system and new processes, and preparing for the transition.

During transition, people might doubt the usefulness of process changes in conjunction with the new system, and there may be some confusion and a tendency to hold on to the former ways of thinking and doing things – old spreadsheets, the previous database, etc. During those first few days (and weeks) of using the new system, help ease the transition by talking about the way things were before, including inefficiencies and stress points, and by emphasizing the benefits of the new processes and systems.

Most importantly, persevere with moving forward to the new way of working and thinking and let go of those side spreadsheets and Access databases. When everyone is sharing responsibility and there is accountability for data integrity, the value of such changes can result in the ROI your organization is seeking – to achieve operational and reporting needs that the organization sought by implementing the new system. Everyone investing in the integrity of the data in the new system means everyone can trust the data, especially when you get that phone call requesting a report and you click a few buttons, have the report and can trust it is correct – such trust becomes priceless.