Photo by Casey Horner
Show us an organization that doesn’t have a team of capable people focused on their technology and we’ll show you a hundred ways they are squandering everything. Money. Impact. Staff time and satisfaction. Constituent experience. Understanding of their performance. Business intelligence. Funder engagement. Opportunities for improvement.
Is your technology a supercharger or an anchor?
Are your systems making everyone’s jobs better and more effective? Are they giving you actionable intelligence? Are they in constant service of making everything better, all the time? Or are they frustrating the best efforts of staff and leaders who are trying their best to make magic in the world? And if so, can you afford to keep plugging your eyes and ears and hoping this gaping deficit somehow magically stops dragging you down?
The good news is there’s a reliable way out of this mess. It’s about putting a certain type of team in charge of certain types of technology, and giving them specific roles and a specific mandate. The bad news is that it might require more people than you might expect, doing different things than you probably expect. Finding the right people and setting them up to succeed in transforming your organization takes money and focus and work. And there is no shortcut.
But that shouldn’t really be too surprising, should it? Nothing important, in any realm, truly excels without talented people steering it. Technology is no different. Your technology needs to support your specific operation beautifully, within a world of boundless options and intense complexity. That requires a capable and sophisticated team, inside your walls. As long as you fight it, you will continue to suffer continuous technology pain and immeasurable missed opportunity.
Put smart, capable people on your technology. A specific team of people, doing specific things (see Roadmap to a Better Technology Tomorrow). There are plenty of ways to screw it up, but doing it right doesn’t require any special magic. It’s about assembling the right team of the right people with the right boundaries, helping point them towards the right north star, and giving them the mandate, time, and space they need to do the job well.
We can help you get there. But first you have to decide that where you’re headed is a genuine transformation into an organization that includes strategic, ever-improving technology as part of its very DNA. Full bore, guns blazing, with real money and focus behind the effort. The future winners of your industry are already headed this way. This is a defining moment in your organization’s battle for future relevance and effectiveness. It’s time to sink or swim.