NetHope Summit, Day Two - On the Same Page

I'd like to talk about two comments that were bookends to day two of the Summit in Nairobi.

This morning, Weibe Boer, Associate Director of the Rockefeller Foundation, challenged us with two things:

1) To encourage our other back office departments (HR , Finance, Legal) about the what, why, how and benefits of collaboration;

2) To have a double impact as NGO IT leaders: first, on program delivery in the Field, and second, creating economic impact on emerging countries by where we choose to put our IT services.

The role we increasingly play as NetHope is advocating within our own organizations on the value of technology and the impact it can have on our work. Charlie MacCormack, Save the Children's CEO, spoke about this in a white paper on the NetHope web site. Charlie concluded that over the past 13 years "the same headquarters staff is supporting over two times the number of people who are working with children in the field. That type of productivity gain would not be possible without technology."

Our Board panel said similar things about increased technology investments in the midst of the recession. It's one of the few capacity building levers we can pull in our downsized organizations. Doing that together has proven even more impactful, realizing more than a 300% return on our NetHope investment. This is a collaboration that works, which other departments would do well to emulate.

Our Shared Services initiative is about building capacity, not necessarily by off-shoring IT services, as many of our corporate colleagues have done, but growing services to meet increased Field application demand. NGOs are behind the corporate IT services curve, and therefore usually do not realize the savings by moving functions to lower cost alternatives. If we have a small services staff, with only 8-hour by 5-day support, we are hard pressed to find the 30% plus savings that other organizations do. However, if we share services, we can grow support to 24 by 7 without increasing support costs.

One of the reasons we are in Kenya, is we believe that this increased capacity can be better delivered by an emerging country, especially one in which we deliver our program services. That these decisions can help the local economy is a "give-back" opportunity for us.

This evening, I had the honor of introducing Catherine Ngahu, Chairperson of the Kenya ICT Board, our host at this year's Summit. When I learned that she was very interested in the social side of technology, I could think of no better way to introduce her to NetHope than with the story of the Fallen Tree. I said that we are that village who sang from the same page and moved the obstacle out of the way forward-- no matter whether the challenge of insufficient staff, budget or equipment, when we all pull together and trust each other, we can move mountains.

Catherine then told a story about the importance of context that we would do well to heed in our technology work. It was about an ad campaign NGOs ran a few decades ago to encourage the poor in Africa to have smaller families. The marketing approach was to show a family with four healthy children in front of a nice home, contrasted with a family with eight children in front of a meager shelter. However, the poor kept having more children. When they finally asked them why, they said the ad told them that poor families have more children! This was a perfect way to end the day: ask and listen before you build. We can be on the same page with our audience as well.

NetHope Summit, Day One – The Big Rocks

We kicked off our NetHope Summit in Nairobi Kenya today. All 29 members were represented; with our sponsors and guests, we have 90 attending. It is very gratifying to see the simple vision of collaboration I wrote about nine years ago having become the force for shared technology in nonprofit organizations.

We heard welcoming remarks from Bill Brindley, NetHope CEO and Paul Kukubo, CEO of the Kenya ICT Board. It was over a year ago in Geneva that Paul and I talked about Kenya hosting a NetHope Summit. Hearing his welcome brought home more than the importance of the work we do as NGOs in the emerging world. Paul talked about how the shared services concepts he saw beginning in NetHope were being applied throughout the Kenya government organizations today. Now we can learn from their success.

This is one of the messages I touched on in my Summit address this afternoon: we need to have the humility to learn from the far reaches of our organizations, and the people we assist, how technology can be applied to benefit all. As IT leaders in NGOs we need to be clear that our beneficiaries and our fieldworkers are our top customers.

To make the point of the fieldworker as our #1 customer, I told Steven Covey's story about the rocks [1]

To paraphrase the parable:

A teacher placed a large jar on the table in front of the classroom and proceeded to fill it with large rocks.
"Is it full," he asked the class.
All the students said "yes!"
He then took a carton of gravel and added it to the jar.
"Is it full," he repeated.
Becoming more wary, half the class said yes.
He then took a carton of sand and added it to the jar.
"Is it full now?"
None of the students raised their hand.
The teacher added a pitcher of water.
"Now?"
"Yes."
"So what’s the moral of this story," he queried?
"That there’s always room for more," some asked [2]?
"No," he said;
“The point of the experiment is that if you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never fit them in."

So I challenged the NetHope group: as you go out and visit field programs this week, and meet people who work here in Kenya and East Africa, ask yourself one question: What are the big rocks?
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[1]Stephen Covey story: First Things First, Simon & Schuster, 1999, pp. 88-89

[2]That may be our “normal” answer in nonprofit organizations; everything can fit under the umbrella of the good!

A Strategic Look into 2011

I received a letter recently from a NetHope member CIO asking for some advice for a meeting with his senior management strategy team. With his permission, I’ve turned this into a letter of questions and answers, below.

Every so often it’s useful to pause and take the helicopter of our imagination up a few stories and look at the broader landscape. Here is one such view, for which I invite your comments.

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Dear T,

First, welcome to the NetHope team. I am delighted that you have joined our collective of NGO ICT leaders.

I’m happy to give you some thoughts in response to your 2011 ICT outlook. You have listed four areas worthy of forecasting.

Q: In our next “Senior Management Team Meeting” one important agenda point will be to give a strategic outlook on the year 2011. Which trends do we expect, which challenges and opportunities?

Let me start by quoting an American author and humorist who wrote over a century ago, before the age of technology: “The art of prophecy is very difficult-- especially with respect to the future"! Two thoughts follow from this:

1. Forecasting future IT trends is risky business; history shows that we usually get it wrong. So while strategy is about making bets on future destinations, your “b plan” is as important as your “a-plan.”

2. In times of crises and uncertainty (think recession), smart organizations vary like mad. Ask yourself every few months: what is my portfolio of pilots and experiments for testing ideas? Learn from this: throw away what doesn’t work: take to scale what succeeds.

Q: “Cloud Computing”/virtualization of services & applications as well as Web 2.0 are further increasing the “digital gap”, but not only between North and South but also between the “Generation Facebook” and the “Generation 40+”. Does our management still understand the world in which people between 15 and 30 are living? Do we use all technologies which we could use to help children, organize ourselves efficiently and raise funds?

For Cloud-computing and the “digital gap,” I see an additional divide growing between newer NGOs (e.g., Kiva.org) and established NGOs. The reason for this is that established ways of delivering ICT is hard for organizations to change, especially when IT resources are so limited. It’s easier for a newer, younger or smaller NGOs to adopt cloud computing than it is for older, larger NGOs. Here are three strategies for bridging this divide:

1. Create a small group and send them away, preferably to another country, to build on and adopt the newer technologies from scratch. Take your brightest under 30, Gen-Y tech-savvy IT and business people and have them work away from headquarters, the further the better.

2. Partner with a newer web 2.0-savvy NGOs and learn from them by having them deliver services for donors and beneficiaries on your behalf.

3. Bet on established technology companies who offer a fluid set of options for premises-based and cloud-based computing so you can evolve to the Cloud while older technologies coexist in your organization (think Microsoft BPOS, for example.)

Additional food for thought: I’d expand to those in developing countries Gary Hamel’s advice that CIOs hang out with under-25 year-olds to learn about new uses and ways of working with technology. For example, watch how beneficiaries use mobile phones to move information and get work done, not just talk. When given the opportunity, the poor may be our brightest innovators and entrepreneurs. Will we be humble enough to learn from them?

Q: IT literacy is getting increasingly a precondition to get a proper job. Do we offer children enough training in this area (using PC and Internet)?

On IT Literacy, I’m a big supporter of workforce development and readiness programs that teach computer skills. Three points to consider:

1. In Bolivia, adolescents trained in hardware/software 101 are now helping their teachers use and maintain the schools’ computers. Don’t underestimate the ability of children to train younger children (and sometimes the reverse happens, as in the hole-in-the-wall computer project in India’s slums – see http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/ ).

2. Look at the technology award programs for students like Microsoft’s Imagine Cup and Intel’s Science Talent Search program. Both attract students from around the globe and develop more innovations in six months than I’ve seen in years. It’s one of the primary reasons I volunteer as a judge in these events. Partner with technology companies who run these contests and send them your unfunded IT projects to work on!

3. Take this to the next step and start a competition in your organization to uncover hidden technology talents in other departments and in the field offices. Make it fun; have an award ceremony that’s a big deal, even if no cash is involved. Then look to harvest the innovative applications for others to use, and take them to scale in your ICT offerings.

Q: Collaboration between NGOs in the area of technology will help to decrease the problem of underfunded IT. To what extent can we imagine standardization across NGOs (not only within our organization)?

Collaboration is indeed an important trend for extending the creative, advocacy and learning power of your organization. In NetHope, we can attest that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. When you look at your IT budget, plan on these additional factors:

1. NGO Discounts: The purchasing power of a collective of organizations is substantial. See the NetHope Deals and Discounts doc on the TAG site for specific NetHope member benefits

2. Technology Gifts in Kind: These often come from NetHope partners, like Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and Dell, but increasingly come from in-country or regional branches of these global organizations, each of whom has their own philanthropy budget.

3. Volunteers: In addition to the ideas above, seek IT-skilled volunteers from local corporations, secondary schools and universities. Nonprofits have not done a good job of marshaling IT volunteers. That’s an area that’s ripe for developing.

Finally, I’d argue that the most important trend for nonprofits over the next three years is to

1. Get out of the infrastructure business, and

2. Reinvest more in the mission-moving technologies

I developed these thoughts in my NetHope Annual Meeting presentation, which is on my web site, under “2009” papers, here: http://www.hpmd.com/hpmd/EGHprofile.nsf/links/50A6 . You can also find related discussions on my blog at http://eghapp.blogspot.com/ .


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In answer to your follow-up questions, here are some further thoughts:


Q: Is education and quality management what you mean with the top of the pyramid or do you see additional possibilities?

The top two levels of the NGO IT pyramid are the most strategic. They are focused on the child (in the case of your organization) and on the fieldworker who works with children. At each level of the pyramid, ask “who is the person who touches the technology?” That’s the audience for your strategic objectives at each level. (At level 3. there are two audiences: the organization’s business unit leaders, and the donors. At level 4 it’s primarily the employees of the organization (usually headquarter focused) and the applications that depend on the IT infrastructure platforms.)


Q: Regarding education: do you know any good program that goes beyond learning how to use a computer, how to use the Internet? (Target group: kids in Africa and Asia.) How can we use mobile phones for these programs?

For children, three programs areas come to mind where technology is the delivery means:

1. Education programs: as a means to (1) learn new content (e.g. on-line text books), (2) supplement a shortage of teachers (a key issue in Tanzania) with eLearning, and (3) workforce readiness (for example, learning technology skills for IT service jobs—see the Fundatec program in Brazil on the Microsoft grants page, here: http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenship/en-us/our-actions/in-the-community/grant-recipients.aspx .)

2. Health information: examples (a) disseminating HIV-AIDS info to adolescent mobile phones (STC has a program in the Republic of Georgia; there are others in Africa), (b) health clinic registration programs using PDAs (for example, an extension of STC’s work in Bangladesh; David Isaak (mailto: disaak@savechildren.org) a consultant I worked with at STC can help.)

3. Microcredit and banking: examples: (a) providing micro loans to mother-daughter entrepreneur teams (I saw the potential for this in Minya, Egypt during a field visit last year.) and (b) student savings accounts via mobile phones (I believe Vodafone, via Africacom, is working on this in Kenya and elsewhere.)

I hope this helps stimulate ideas; there are many opportunities to introduce mission-moving technologies at our organizations. As an IT leader, I'd argue that's our most relevant job.

Best regards,
Ed

Connections

I was listening on the latest Haiti emergency response team call for NetHope members today. As the group went around the virtual table providing their input, I heard a number say they were grateful for the connections we were able to provide. We have a dozen member locations wired in the Port-au-Prince area since the quake on the 12th. They were also grateful for having Joe, and the Cisco and Inveneo teams there to help solve the myriad of problems that inevitably crop up providing technology links. A number of people said they did not have IT people on the ground in Haiti. Our team became their arms and legs.

In my last entry, I mentioned the power of people connections at work in technology connections. Collaborating means sharing the people as much as the solutions. Maybe more so. I've often referred to this as the "virtual village. In a village, everyone knows each other. When a barn needs building, the carpenters, painters and masons show up and lend a hand. This is what our village in Haiti is doing with the ICT building blocks. We help each other, so together we can help those who need us most.

Partnering in Haiti

The adage “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” is fundamental to an organization responding in Haiti, no matter how narrow the mission. There are 21 NetHope member NGOs responding in Haiti, with over 3,500 workers on the ground. Each is doing what it does best, whether search-and-rescue, providing clean water, or distributing mosquito nets. NetHope adds shared communications to coordinate their work. Corporate partners, in-turn, add expertise, equipment and rapid funds to move it forward.

Here are some highlights from Friday’s status reports of people on-the ground:

• Inveneo [a corporate partner] installed three Member offices today.
• The network is presently operating at: CHF (2 sites), Save the Children (2 sites), Catholic Relief Services, CARE, Concern, [and soon at] Oxfam, with broadband connections to the Internet fully restored.
• ITC Global [another corporate partner] bumped the satellite capacity up to 2.5 megabits
• Kah conducted a VSAT site survey at CHF2 and STC today. There is a 2.4 meter VSAT already installed at STC. It is not operational but ITC Global is planning to commission it. This will permit the system we were going to install at CHF2 to go somewhere else or be available as a back up.
• An additional 2 meg capacity is committed for the NetHope relief network courtesy of Multilink [another corporate partner], who were told good things about the work we are doing by our friends at Cisco TACOPS [a long-term NetHope corporate partner]. We will work with Multilink, Cisco and Inveneo to plan for adding this to existing capacity.
  

Notice the connections among the responders and corporate partners. Couple this with the rapid contributions from Microsoft and Blackbaud and you can see the power of people connections at work in technology connections. One of our funders put it succinctly: “we know you, we trust you; we partner with people who know how to respond.” That’s an added value of relationships, based on trust and a history of working together.

One of the lessons we learned from the 2004 Tsunami response in Southeast Asia is the need to make decisions quickly, and in ways that are different from the typical ways of decision-making. That’s true for those doing relief work as well as those supporting this work. Following the Tsunami response, an NGO marketing director recalled, “We didn’t have time to have all the meetings, all the reviews, and all the approvals. We had to make on-the-spot-decisions. The interesting thing”, she continued, “is that nothing fell apart.” Extraordinary times require extraordinary approaches.

One of the founding principles of NetHope is “benefiting all benefits one.” Doing things together, like setting up VSAT communications in Haiti, helps each member do its work. That means that some members often do more, but that’s part of the commitment to doing things together to benefit all. The work in Haiti demands no less.

Haiti, The First Week

I stopped by my alma mater, Save the Children, yesterday. A banner was hanging from the front of the building announcing Haiti relief efforts and a web address; on the door was a sign saying walk-in donations were welcome[1].

A week after a 7.3 earthquake struck Haiti, we are seeing a massive response from governments, nonprofits and others. All the major relief agencies, including the UN, have near-daily briefings and situation reports. The cry for information is as strong as the cry for help. The two are inseparably linked. Donors want to know how they can help, what’s being done, and where there is hope. Headquarter workers needs to know from those on the ground how many are hurt, missing, displaced and dead.

In the early stages of disaster response, there is a bit of chaos. First, is assuring that workers in-country and their families are safe and counted. Next are the rapid needs assessments for food, water, shelter and medical supplies. Sat-phones are most often the earliest form of communications, if they are charged and accessible. Resources are readily shared; we’ve worked together before.

This time I’m working with NetHope, an organization I helped found. NetHope is a collective made up of IT leaders from 28 international nonprofits who understand the need to collaborate to bring information and communications technologies out the last 100 kilometers to the most challenged areas in which we work. We’re focused on collaborating among our members to provide essential connections that enable information to flow, which in turn supports the critical mission of ensuring supplies and people go to where they’re needed most.

Many of the non-government organizations (NGOs) in Haiti are smaller than the UN with far fewer IT resources. To be effective in IT in troubled areas of the world, we’ve found again and again that we need to collaborate and share so that every NGO has access to core data and voice communications. Consistent, reliable communication is one of the cornerstones of relief efforts, ensuring that aid reaches the people who need it most.

Today one of our NetHope engineers is working with a member, CHF International, who occupies high ground ideal for a satellite link. Here’s a bit from his first report:

We arrived at CHF compound today just before dark. Kah located a clear line of site to AMC4 and IS14 [Satellites] on a “safe” part of the roof (both come back to ITC’s Miami teleport.)

The panels of the dish have to be pulled up on rope lines from outside; too big to go up the stairs. CHF has that covered and will help us tomorrow. Power and cabling does not look to be a problem.

Information about what members offices need to be connected would be good to gather soon so we may have sites to survey when Inveneo gets here. The CHF office is on high ground which is promising for that part of what we are trying to do.

We should also add up the incremental power requirements for everything we plan to locate at CHF.

BTW we just now got informed that the US military is imposing a 9 pm curfew

These high-bandwidth satellites will provide the second wave of information connections. Sharing technology among member NGOs is core to what NetHope provides – acting as the data and communications trunk that feeds the major branches of the NGO community. This is all about working together to make the connections—in every sense of the word—that allow the aid to flow.

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[1] For details, see http://www.savethechildren.org/

New Leaf

In Wiring the Global Village, the connections are ultimately about people and not technology

There comes a time when you realize that you have achieved your goals and it is time to move on to the next chapter in your story. I am at that juncture and need to turn the page. I therefore elected to take an early retirement from Save the Children.

Here are some of the remarks I made at my final staff meeting at Save that I'd like to share with the rest of you. These are words of encouragement and challenge, not only for IT at Save, but technology people at all nonprofit organizations.

It’s been a memorable decade at Save, and there is much for the IT teams to be proud of. Here are the top-10 numbers I count as standout achievements:

• 241 Intel Classmates being used in Bolivia and Bangladesh schools
• 225 PDA’s in service in the Bangladesh Food Security and M&E programs
• 3.7 – the Internal Client Satisfaction Index for IT among our field offices
• 5 Alliance members on the path to share a common financial management system
• 186 Field Offices wired for doing business across the Internet
• 6 Systems Building enterprise projects funded for meeting business unit needs
• 29 video conference rooms in operation across the Alliance
• 2 Legacy AS400 midrange computers retired
• First of 28 NetHope members in the most successful international NGO collaboration to-date
• 0.6% – the voluntary turnover rate in IT for the past 5 years (until the recent restructuring)

However, these numbers don’t tell the whole story. As Charlie [our CEO] put it so well, we have been the team that has brought technology into the 21^st century at Save.

Part of this has been about vision, and part has been about hard day-to-day change. Some have suggested that I’ve often been five steps ahead of everyone else. That’s short of chess masters who claim to see a dozen moves ahead, so there’s always room for improvement. Though it’s often been a lot of change to handle, I’ve always felt that if you stand still, you get hit by the train.

Let me tell you a story to illustrate the point:

Imagine a bullfrog sitting on an old train rail. It is a strong frog. It is a fast frog. It is a wise and noble frog. One could even say it’s a prince of a frog!

In the far distance, from the south, is a faint whistle.

"It is nothing," thinks the frog. "I can stay put."

Ever so slowly the whistle grows louder. "Ah, the sun is warm," sighs the frog, "It is nothing."

Louder still gets the whistle. "There is time," says the frog, "the wind whistles too."

Then the whistle becomes a roar.

"I feel a rumble," the frog says out loud, "perhaps I should pay attention."

He turns too late and is flattened by a roaring bullet train, barreling to the north.

"But wait," you say, "It is a wise frog!"

“Rewind the story.”

“The frog would jump in time, wouldn’t it?”

"OK," I say, "the frog jumps to neighboring rail, a familiar stretch of iron."

And he's hit by a different train, an old freight train, barreling to the south.

Right now, in our IT departments in nonprofit organizations, we are the frog. The whistle that grows steadily louder, the northbound train, is the call to move north, to be a more mission-moving force in our organizations. The freight train lumbering south, is the recession, hard times, and the retrenchment to familiar, lights-on operations.

Now imagine you are the frog. What do you do? In many ways, we have been a team that’s moved forward. And this is our call anew today.

So what am I doing for the next chapter? There’s a “burning platform” that needs attending. We need to move the IT agenda up the pyramid, as you’ve heard me say a hundred times or so. As most NetHope members have experienced the budget cuts of the past year, it’s hard to keep the lights on, let alone make the changes needed for leveraging technology for delivering our programs in the field. How to better do that is my next mission. You can expect to hear some great things coming out of NetHope and elsewhere as a result.

Lastly and most importantly is my sincere thank you to all who put in the long hours and dealt with the complex and thorny problems that technology often presents. We could not have achieved our goals without the team work. For that I will be forever grateful.