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.

Resolutions

Last week a journalist asked for my comments about New Year’s resolutions for CIOs. “Could you give me a few ideas,” she wrote. I sent her three, which I’ll unpack for your holiday reading pleasure.

Resolution #1: Ponder Paul Samuelson’s: “Good questions outrank easy answers.”[1] We would do well spending time with the right questions in the coming year. One I recommend wrestling with: how are you shaking up the business, inspiring your peers to imagine in new ways, and empowering your customers (or beneficiaries)? This may prove the better question than asking how we can better align with our business peers—a good question to ask anew, but a rear-view mirror, to borrow a Tom Peters’ phrase. Times of crisis are an invitation to experiment, harvest what works before the turnaround, and have the humility to recognize the answers that come from places we least expect.[2]

Resolution #2: Do not allow a retreat to lights-on computing take the IT agenda from moving missions. In nonprofits we've seen IT budgets and staff slashed to operations-only cost levels. That means little to no IT time and budget will be spent on technology that impacts field workers and beneficiaries. That’s cutting the wrong things. We end up spending a greater percentage of the technology budget pie on commodity items like email and desktop computing. We need to get out of the infrastructure business and redeploy more resources to get into the mission-moving business[3].

Resolution #3: Employees increasingly want to help save the world; help make the connections to do so. Over the past five years we've seen an explosion of interest in colleges, business schools and the new generation of employees, in business for social good. It’s a fundamental shift from good corporate citizenship, and the desire to give back, to an expectation that our businesses can make a difference in the big global issues like poverty. This isn't about rich versus poor, as a “we versus them;” this is about us –to paraphrase John Green[4] That means more partnering among corporations, nonprofits and people in emerging countries. It’s a question—to come full circle—about what are we doing together?
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[1] Echoing Rilke’s “Learn to love the questions,” economist Paul Samuelson died at his home at Belmont, Massachusetts on December 13. He was 94. As a fellow collector of quotes aptly said, “… Samuelson was brilliant, insightful, and witty. He kept thinking about the economy, and writing articles, up until two weeks ago. He will be missed.” (See G. Armour Van Horn’s collection at http://www.qotd.org/search/search.html?aid=5345 )
[2] As Jim Collins notes, when there is rapid change and uncertainty, smart organizations vary like mad. See Jim Collins, Built to Last, Harper Collins, 1995, pp. 146-47. I want to know what's the portfolio of experiments the CIO is sponsoring? No experiments; no innovation. So to apply the Tom Peters’ phrase above, business alignment has been overrated in that it’s looking back on the organization that is rather than on what it can be.
[3] For nonprofits, this means more radical partnering in 2010, sharing services, and trusting others to do the basics. We need to standardize and share business processes and applications; invest the savings in applications that deliver programs, and innovate with those app’s that beneficiaries can use directly. Something to add to our agenda in 2010: in addition to things that run the operation, and build the business, we need a portfolio of prototypes from which we can harvest. To put more pointedly: build versus run is not enough for IT. We need, build, run, and experiment to innovate, which means more pilots and prototypes, even from outside our organization
[4] See John Green’s video response to Shawn Ahmed and the “Uncultured Project,” here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4dFv8sauZE
“[Nonprofit advertisements are] making you think that the poor are in some ways fundamentally different from us; that they’re like a ‘them.” So in our minds it becomes this formulation: we should help them. But it’s not a ‘them’ problem; it’s an ‘us’ problem. We need to help us.”

Panels, Speeches and Leadership

It's been a busy six weeks since my last post. I've made two presentations and participated in two panels. The former are posted on my web site. Some common themes are emerging that I'd like to highlight by event.

C-Suite Trust Panel, “On Leadership,” NYC, October 22

The most important take-away for me studying and experiencing leadership is being in touch with what brings you alive. This is sometimes referred to as authenticity, or "true north" as Bill George calls it.[1] It's two of the five characteristics Jack Welch emphasized for CEOs: Energy and Energizing.[2] There is nothing as contagious as pursuing your passion. To illustrate this, I told the story of the Tree in Zaire. Emulating the old man who sang the song at the core of the village moved mountains (or in this case a large tree.)

My second take-away is to immerse yourself in the dialog of the brightest people you can find. Try out your ideas with people smarter and more experienced than you; and be open to being surprised by how much your own thinking and creativity ratchets up.

Third, be the first one up the hill, and the last one to take credit. Being five steps ahead is both good and bad. People want to know where you are going, what’s the destination (the core to strategy.) And they also want you to recognize that change is hard. Bottom line: care.

Fourth, have the humility to partner and collaborate; going solo is to waste more resources than may be readily apparent. At NetHope, we’ve found that the key to collaborating is trust. Leaders would do well to remember that trust is long to build and short to bring down.

CCITDG Conference, “Making a Difference in Interesting Times,” UK, October 8

I gave the keynote address to set the tone for this UK NGO CIO leadership event. I posted my slides on my web site. The top three things for me that came out of the Q&A that followed were:

1) Immerse yourself and your organization in the courageous conversations.[3] For the NGO CIO leader, this means talking about divesting yourself of the infrastructure management and taking on more of the mission moving technology (i.e., Field technology.)

2) My epitaph: "He made connections for good." This was tied to Tom Peter’s nightmare of finding his tombstone with “he made budget” on it (which I paraphrased as “he cut costs”), and in response, to “what would I want on my tombstone. Asking the “legacy:” question is an important leadership exercise. In the end, what do I want my and my team’s work to be about?

3) Collaborate or perish as irrelevant IT. This was the conclusion of having a fifth less IT budget in NGOs on average than corporations, and erring on the side of “lights-on” IT, which in the end is irrelevant to our mission. To do the mission moving things we need to do, we must collaborate.

2009 NGO Executive Workshop, “The Role of NGOs in Unleashing Technology,” a panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative Conference, NYC, September 22

Akhtar Badshah, Senior Director of Community Affairs at Microsoft and a long-term colleague, presented an important paper to kick off this session. His title: “Unleashing Technology to Advance Social & Economic Development.” One of the statements he made summed up the challenge: “there are not enough healthcare workers to provide healthcare to every person—we need new delivery models.” I could not agree more. We need new delivery models—not only for healthcare but for all our program areas, in the Field and in the value-chains that reach back to the donors who drive the engine that is humanitarian aid.

Microsoft invited me and four other colleagues to discuss these issues in a panel that followed Akhtar’s noon-time address. Here are some the Q&A I contributed:

1) What are the key challenges with IT for NGOs and social development today?

Three things:

a) The tyranny of the “pie chart” that hampers investments in game-changing technology innovations[4],

b) Shrinking undesignated revenue that funds most IT spending in NGOs, and

c) The rise of ICT4D[5] applications in the Field.

This last one I consider an opportunity. The severe under-spend on technology in NGOs means that over 85% of the IT budget goes to operations and applications in headquarters. That needs to shift if we are going to take the ICT4D pilots to scale and have real impact.

2) How are you thinking about the new technology business models (social networking, etc?)

One of the growing trends is the new workers are bringing their technology with them into the workplace. The word we are hearing is that “my tech is better than your tech.” In many cases they are right. Many NGO IT directors are locking out these consumer techniques. I think that’s a mistake. Most significant changes in the IT department over the past 30 years have been through such user revolutions. We need to embrace rather than fight these changes.

3) You are a leader when it comes to IT for development. Where do you see innovative technologies being developed and what difference can they make?

I look to NetHope pilot projects as my innovation lab. Recent ICT4D pilots among NetHope members, like the Catholic Relief Services Cassava Root disease program using Intel classmates and messaging forms, are an opportunity to build on the work of one for the good of many. That’s a key value for NetHope’s brand of collaboration. It means sharing the results and taking them to scale across other members in other sectors.

Another source of innovation is student competitions, like Microsoft’s Imagine Cup. As a judge for the past two years, I’ve seen more innovation in a week from these amazing student teams than I’ve seen in five year at NGOs. We should take this as a positive challenge, and gain the humility to look to their ideas and prototypes as rich sources of technology innovation for NGOs. I’ve written about this experience in my Blog and continue to pursue the connections between students and nonprofit work.

4) Based on your advice and learnings throughout your careers, what advice do you have to put people on the path to using IT for social and economic development?

Understand your delivery value chain and where you can build capacity (improve productivity) for incremental and radical improvements. Of the seven levers you can pull, the first four are about people (hire better people, training those you have, advocate with local governments and agencies, and partner with other NGOs.) The last three are about technology (better tools, processes and standards.) This last one may be the most obscure, but the history of IT is clear: convergence of platforms and applications (a tenet of standards) costs less and delivers more.

NTEN Online Technology Conference, “Strategic Thinking for Leaders,” September 16

I presented a seminar on this first NTEN web-based conference, showcasing the book Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission[6], in which I authored the chapter on the technology future for nonprofits. I posted my slides on my web site. The top take-aways for this session bring us full circle with yesterday’s leadership panel:

1) IT Strategy at an NGO is about capacity building and moving the agenda up the strategy pyramid to mission-moving applications

2) NGOs cannot follow in the footsteps of corporations; we need to stand on their shoulders

3) Look to the future in the Field and the schools

4) Ask good questions

A fitting ending to this whirlwind tour is Ranier Rilke’s famous quote: “…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.”

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[1]Bill George, True North, Jossey-Bass, 2007, p. 66.

[2] Jack Welch, Winning, Harper Business, 2005, see the 4-E framework on p. 84. Also note Howard Thurman's notable quote: "Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. What the world needs is people who have come alive."

[3] See David Whyte’s “Life at the Frontier - Leadership Through Courageous Conversation” audio CD, 2004.

[4] See By Ann Goggins Gregory & Don Howard, “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fall 2009.

[5] See the ICT4D article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_communication_technologies_for_development

[6] Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders, Holly Ross, Katrin Verclas, and Alison Levine, editors; Jossey-Bass, 2009.

Strategic Thinking for Leaders

I'll be leading a session on strategy on September 16 at the upcoming NTEN Online Nonprofit Technology Conference. You can find event details at http://nten.org/ontc. If you enter the discount code ONTC25 you will receive 25% off registration - $250 for members / $350 for nonmembers. See you on-line!