How do I learn?

Last week, I spent a day at the Charity Learning Consortium conference. The day was focussed on eLearning and among a number of very good speakers was one from Google. His talk focussed on how Google rank people internally as a knowledge resource, and have started to engage people as technology mentors and ‘ad hoc’ trainers based on (a) their willingness to fulfil such a role, and (b) their ranking as an ‘expert’ in a particular field by their peers.

This discussion set me thinking about my approach to learning. Some years ago I heard a lecture from Marcus Buckingham based on his book ‘Now Discover Your Strengths’. Marcus works for Gallup and which does thousands and thousands of assessments of people’s individual strengths. I’ll leave you to look up the detail, but anyway, it turns out my number one strength is ‘Learner’. To quote the definition in Marcus’s book: 

‘You love to learn….. The process, more than the content or result, is especially exciting for you.’

Despite this, over the years, I have been on very few training courses. I now learn through a whole new set of media. Number one among them is Google. If I want to find out about a subject, I Google it. I may watch a video, read an article, find a conference, but I pretty much never find a course in a classroom. Why? Because I get bored in classrooms. I read the articles, or the manual and play with the technology (if I can get my hands on it. That’s how I learn. 

Why am I telling you this? Because I used to think this was a poor way to keep up to date, but the Charity Learning Consortium meeting, along with a number of other ‘experts’ in the field who I have heard talk about learning, have confirm to me that it isn’t. And continually learning in the IT world is more important now that it ever has been. If you wait for someone to come along and offer to teach you about the new technologies that are out there, you will be left behind. 

The more I talk to people about this, I realise I am not such an unusual learner. So if you hear about a technology you think sounds interesting, Google it and learn about it. It may be just what your non-profit needs.

A world of Apps

Since I’ve been working in IT, there have been two seismic shifts in the technology landscape. The first was the advent of the PC, the second was the development of the internet. 

When the PC appeared on the scene, it was very much an end user driven phenomenon. At the time, I was working within the corporate IT function of a large retailer. The organisational mentality was very IBM mainframe oriented and highly centrally controlled. PCs were consigned to a group called ‘end user computing’, subject to director level sign off, and seen as an annoying inconvenience that had to be tolerated because the people asking for them had enough political clout. 

By the time the internet came along, I was working on global IT projects for organisations across a wide range of sectors. Again this new thing was viewed was a lot of confusion, suspicion and distain by the IT functions of these organisations. It was very much the end users, the people outside the IT organisation that drove adoption.

I believe we are on the cusp of the next revolution in IT and once again it will be driven by users not by the IT practitioners within our organisations. No, I’m not talking about social media, I’m talking about the ‘App’.

The App model, so expertly marketed by Apple, changes our whole approach to applications, not just on a smart phone or tablet, but across the whole IT landscape. It takes big applications and breaks them down into small pieces, where I only take the bits I want. 

While the Iphone/Ipad has got the most coverage over apps, many others are taking up the idea (or were already using it under a different guise). Let me give you some examples. The Drupal open source CMS is based on a core set of code built in modules. Because it is an open API, anyone can write and submit a module to augment the CMS. You can go to the Drupal website and find pretty much anything you need. You download it, install it in the right directory on your server, enable it and away you go. On the Drupal site, you can see how many times a module has been downloaded and get feedback from other users. In the commercial software world, Salesforce has a similar model for add-ons, particularly for tools to provide integration into other applications. 

Extend this idea into some of the traditional desktop applications we all use. Microsoft periodically release a new version of Office with lots of ‘enhancements’ and new features. Many of us have for a long time asked what practical difference the new versions make, and Microsoft is having a harder and harder time selling the benefits of these releases. For most people, they stretch word to fraction of its capability. I use Word a lot and what I mostly need is a few fonts, a few standard formats (heading, main text, bullet points etc.), find and replace, and spellchecker. There are probably a few other things I use, but most of the enhancements of the last ten years have given me very minimal gains. This is even more true when we come to spreadsheets (mainly used as a convenient list by most people), and presentation graphics (Powerpoint).

For most people, an App that does the core functions well is all they need, with a few people needing much more advanced capability. 

In the technology world, users drive revolutions, not central IT management. People want their favourite device. They will want their favourite Apps to do their work, not the rigid ‘standard desktops’ that IT best practice (low cost, high control) dictates. Central IT organisations will fight a rear guard action on security and data management which they will lose – they will have to deal with the new reality not try and stop it Canute like. The future challenge for IT is to deliver platforms that accept the plethora of devices and apps that will be used by the end user. They will need to dictate base standard file formats for the interchange of documents (which apps will deliver as standard); they will have to create robust security strategies that accept, not exclude, the diversity of end user devices and Apps; and they will have to become ‘App developers’ to integrate business applications that are based on packages hosted by a multiplicity of different providers.

Just as the Internet and the PC drove a profound shift in what IT functions do, the App is going to fundamentally change our approach to every aspect of IT delivery and management.

Cloud is not a technology decision

I’ve sat through a lot of debates recently about whether not-for-profits should migrate to the cloud. Most have either focussed on technology questions such as, “Is the cloud better technology than traditional models?” Or cost arguments. But what struck me during these debates - apart from the ubiquitous use of cloud to cover anything that didn’t involve capital expenditure on IT and therefore being a quite useless term for any specific discussion – was that there is a crucial point that is being missed:

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The general overhead for small organisations (as most not-for-profits are) of owning technology.

This was really brought home by two conversations. One was a discussion on benchmarking of IT costs, and whether outsourcing was more expensive than doing it yourself. One of my colleagues made the point that for the outsourcer, all costs are visible and have to be taken into account when setting a price - commercial reality is very harsh if they’re not covering all their costs. Now that’s not to say that the in-house IT organisation doesn’t have to cover its costs, but some of those costs can get deeply hidden within the organisation, and are not immediately visible and attributable in a chart of accounts. For instance, the cost of a finance or HR function may not get included, yet by their very existence IT employees add some burden to these functions.

The second discussion was with a small charity who have engaged an IT support company to help them and wanted someone to ‘sanity check’ what was being proposed to them. You see the manager at the charity didn’t feel that he had sufficient understanding of the technical detail to know whether what he was being told was right and, in particular, whether some of the work could be deferred to manage their cashflow better. Which brings me to my point: 

Cloud solutions such as Google, Microsoft Office 365, Dropbox, Huddle, Salesforce.com etc. take away a set of technology from the organisation so that senior managers no longer have to concern themselves with it.

Now I know this is a claim made by the outsourcing fraternity, but cloud is subtly different. I’ve been involved with a lot of outsourced contracts and they all finish up in discussions, to a greater or lesser degree, as to how much kit you use, what technology it is being managed, how often do you want to change/upgrade it and so on. So management are still involved in gory technology decisions. This is where cloud solutions differ. As a manager, I don’t care about the detail of the underlying technology. I want email; I want file sharing; I want CRM functionality. What hardware, operating system, RAM, DRAM, SAN, UPS,NAS,  SSD, IPV6, Ubuntu, Linux, Windows, SQL, MySQL, SAP, Oracle, and any other acronym you wish to come up with that I don’t give a twopenny stuff about, do we need.

Management time is in short supply in not-for-profits. Managers want to focus what time there is on their passion: what their organisation delivers to its beneficiaries. Detailed IT decisions are the management overhead IT people forget about when they have their technology debates. Most non-IT managers don’t care about this stuff. It just takes time and gets in the way. The cloud allows them not to care, and to focus on what matters, which is how can technology help my organisation deliver more, faster, cheaper, or in completely new ways, without worrying about how much memory do we need in the server or where are we going to put the UPS.

Senior managers in not-for-profits are going to make decisions on cloud solutions on the basis that they save them time, are convenient, and they’re not going to wear out in three years time. Does it do the job? Is the price point right? Will it save the organisation and/or me personally a lot of time? If the answers to these three questions are yes, yes and yes, then expect senior managers in not-for-profits to say yes to the cloud. It’s not a technology argument for them, it’s a business decision!

Why are we so scared of cloud security?

I hear a lot peoples’ reservations about cloud computing. One of the biggest is security. No doubt Dropbox’s recent security lapse will be rolled out at every seminar and conference for the next three years to warn small children, sorry prospective users of cloud services, of the cloud’s inherent insecurity. 

But the more pertinent question is this: is the security of a cloud service weaker or stronger than you currently have? I would wager that for most not-for-profits it is emphatically stronger. I’m as big an advocate of a good firewall and a reputable anti-virus/spam package on all your systems as the next person. But let’s face it, most of the time what we’re protecting against here is the casual opportunist hacker who is targeting literally millions of potential victims. It’s like putting a burglar alarm on your house, it just makes you a bit more secure than the house next door that doesn’t have one when the opportunist thief walks by. A determined, competent hacker, targeting your organisation specifically, will almost certainly get in. Just like a determined competent burglar will break into your house if they decide your’s is the one. When the ‘celebrity’ hacker rings like Anonymous and Luzlsec see the challenge as the CIA (and allegedly succeed) what chance do we really stand?

Cloud providers spend a lot more money on their security, their reputation, as Dropbox are currenly finding out, depends on it. What they have in place is far superior to most not-for-profits. Yes there will be high profile mistakes, but tell me there haven’t been virus infestations and data breaches within hundreds, if not thousands of small not-for-profits. You’re most vulnerable point is the PC in the office with the ‘save password’ options ticked to yes, or the password written on the underside of the keyboard, or the USB stick left on a table at a conference, or that just oh-too-tempting website/email. These vulnerabilities will continue with the cloud and any other technology you use. Cloud providers anti-hack, anti-virus defences will remain a lot stronger than anything you do in house because it is one of the biggest economies of scale they bring to the table and their commercial lives depend on it.

What does IT cost?

One of the discussions I regularly get drawn in to is the “commercial software” versus open source debate. Because the Microsoft Software Donation programme is a large part of what I do, everyone assumes I’m on the side of big business and against the FOSS (free open source software) movement. I’ve always found this something of a false debate. Especially in the not-for-profit sector where so many companies will either donate or heavily discount their products. 

I spent many years doing ‘forensic’ analysis of organisations IT costs, looking at the full cost of IT ownership. The thing that always surprised me was that everyone focussed on the hardware and software costs. In a sense that’s not surprising, they are the big headline numbers and you inevitably have to find the cash to pay for them. Large organisations would invest considerable resources in managing their purchasing processes and getting the best deal for hardware and software.

While getting the best deal is no bad thing, many organisations miss the bigger picture. When you study as many organisations as I have, you realise that people costs contribute for at least half of the total cost of ownership of IT. And if an organisation does their own development work, that can go up to nearly 75%!

Now it’s easy to miss this, as a lot of the people cost in IT is hidden. But whether I use commercial software or free software, I still need the skills and the expertise to deploy it. That means either giving up the time of someone in the organisation who has the skills, or contracting expertise in from outside (by the way, this is where everyone who advocates open source software makes the money to pay the rent). Then once it is deployed, you inevitably have to find someone to support and maintain it. Again this is either an internal person cost or an external support organisation cost.

IT deteriorates over time – that PC that seemed to be the equivalent of an F1 car when it was new, now runs like rusty bicycle. That’s one area where support and maintenance is needed. The other problem is that what we need from IT changes over time. Either way, it needs support and maintenance which costs either in time or money.  

Whatever anyone says to you, IT support costs add up. And the more we get access to low cost software – open source or otherwise – the more these costs come to dominate our overall IT costs. Ignoring this simply leads to long term problems with our systems.

However, recognising this cost, factoring it in when we make choices about our technology, can significantly reduce total cost in the long term. In addition, the lost time among the rest of the people in the rest of the organisation because of poor or defective systems can be significantly reduced.

I’m an engineer by training and engineers always go back to first principles. The first principles of choosing what IT solutions we use are:

• Identify what the organisation needs IT to do (this trumps everything else, every time)
• Identify the alternative technologies which will meet those needs (in IT there’s always more than one solution whatever anybody tells you)
• Identify all the costs associated with the technology throughout its expected lifespan (nothing comes completely free forever, and everything, especially technology, has a limited lifespan)
• Decide what is the best solution for you (balancing lifetime costs and its ability to meet your needs)
• Budget for lifetime support costs as well as up front purchase & implementation costs
• Plan for its replacement

If you do this the answer to the question  commercial software or open source, drop out the bottom.

What does an IT function do & why does that matter when I don't have one

Huge amounts of paper (and computer disc space) have been consumed by the question: "What should an IT function do". It has exercised the brains of academics, business people, consultants, and IT managers/directors since the first commercial computers were put on the market. But for small non-profits, its easy to ignore this question because, by and large, they don't have an IT function.

However, just because a formal IT function doesn't exist, doesn't mean small non-profits can't benefit hugely from the use of technology - there are a whole host of case studies on the CTX website that show how small non-profits use technology to further their missions. The issue for small non-profits is to find a way of delivering the key elements of what an IT function brings without employing more staff in IT than in the rest of the organisation!

A recent article on Computerworld, "IT gets its report card", sets out a good model for what to look for when trying to find IT resources to support your organisation. It splits the IT function into three parts:

• Plan
• Build
• Run

It also highlights that as you run down this list, the resources you need grow.

In my experience, a lot of small non-profits focus on the "build" part of this model, acquiring technology because its available, then fitting it to their needs. But because they don't spend enough time on the "Plan", IT is always a peripheral part of what they do - a necessary evil. This is compounded by a lack of appreciation of the resources needs of "Running" IT which either leads to resentment of the financial drain, or a slow atrophy of the technology to the point where it becomes a hindrance not a benefit.

So where do you find the resources to deliver the "IT function" for a small non-profit without having the people in your organisation? Well for the "Plan" and "Build" functions, one option is to find a volunteer. Because they are specific projects (all be it you will repeat the "Plan" exercise on a regular basis and have multiple "Build" projects), using a volunteer is a practical option. One good place to look for a suitable volunteer is IT4Communities. IT4C have a rosta of IT volunteers with a the full range of skill sets you need. What's more, IT4C can help you stucture the engagement so everyone is clear on what is needed and the commitment they are making.

When it comes to the ongoing "Run" activities, it's best to work with a commercial organisation. Essentially, for the run pieces, you want someone who is available when you need them i.e. when you have a problem. It's no good having to wait a week before your volunteer can look at a problem that is stopping you working. There are a number of commercial IT organisations that focus on the voluntary and charity sectors. Most focus on a particular region and many are social enterprises. The Suppliers Directory, maintained by LASA is a good starting point to finding one. Investing some money at this end of the "IT function" will help to ensure that the time, effort, and aspirations that went into the "Plan" and "Build" stages continues to pay off in the long run.