Making a Difference in Interesting Times

1. Making a Difference in Interesting Times CCitDG Annual Conference October 8th, 2009 Edward Granger-Happ CIO, Save the Children US & UK Chairman, NetHope

2. Five Take-aways • We need to be more than “lights-on” in nonprofits • Have a dream and don’t cut it • NGOs cannot follow in the footsteps of corporations • Collaborate or perish • Ask good questions

3. The value of IT?

4. Interesting Times • Save the Children (US) • Canceled raises (2 years) • 10%+ HQ staff cuts; early retirement packages • CARE (Atlanta) • ~70 staff laid off, including ~60 people in HQ • Salary Cuts: executive by 10%; other staff by 4% • World Vision (US) • 50 staff laid off ~ 5 % US workforce; Eliminated 25 vacant positions • Reducing benefits (retirement match down 50%; co-pays up) • Freezing salaries/Canceling raises • Ford, Kellogg, RWJ Foundations • Offering buyouts to 30-50% staff • Closing offices and cutting travel • Museums and Art Orgs • Layoffs; furloughs; and program scale-back/elimination

5. IT Departments Have Been Hit Hard • % of US NGOs with mandated cuts is 79% • Average % cut from IT Budget is 24% --US NGO-CIO Cost Cutting Survey, April 2009

6. Why is it that technology is too often "the music program of the nonprofit industry, the first to get cut and the last to be reinstated"?  -- Holly Ross, ED, NTEN

7. A parable He CUT COSTS

8. “You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend or not.”--Isabel Allende

9. What’s the single most important strategic question?

10. What’s my destination?

11. Save the Children IT Vision and Strategy

12. My Vision is Simple and Ambitious Making us all part of one virtual village. Connect! • Why? We can imagine a village, a village is connected, needs are personally known & met • Strategy is about setting a destination & having a clear vision about what that destination looks like • A story about Fraser…

13. Double the number of children we reach with quality programs. Increase Alliance collaboration to build our global movement for children

14. Technology is a Key to Building Capacity More Effective Impact At Greater Scale Effective, Efficient, Scalable Programs Hiring Training Partnering Processes Standards Advocacy Tools Systems Impact Funding Support

15. STC IT Strategy – Moving the Agenda Up the Pyramid Competitive or Leading CHILD “Differentiating” Child & Field Facing PROGRAM “Improving Program Delivery” Increasing Impact to Children OPERATIONAL “Helping the Organization Run” Efficient Donor & HQ Facing FOUNDATIONAL “Keeping the Lights On”

16. The Strategy Changes at Each Level Pilot & Build Competitive or Leading CHILD “Differentiating” Connect & Deliver PROGRAM “Improving Program Delivery” Increasing Impact to Children OPERATIONAL “Helping the Organization Run” Buy, Co-op & COTS Efficient Drive out costs, In-source, Shared Services FOUNDATIONAL “Keeping the Lights On”

17. And the Good Enough Boundary is High Pilot & Build Competitive or Leading CHILD “Differentiating” Innovative, value-added Technology Connect & Deliver PROGRAM “Improving Program Delivery” Increasing Impact to Children “Good Enough” Commodity Technology OPERATIONAL “Helping the Organization Run” Buy, Co-op & COTS Drive out costs, In-source, Shared Services FOUNDATIONAL “Keeping the Lights On”

18. “What makes a resource truly strategic … is not ubiquity but scarcity. You only gain an edge over rivals by having or doing something that they can't have or do. By now, the core functions of IT — data storage, data processing, and data transport — have become available and affordable to all.” --Nicolas Carr

19. Some Dysfunctional Pyramids Value-less IT? The low cost utility; Efficient and headless Drive out costs, In-source, Shared Services FOUNDATIONAL “Keeping the Lights On”

20. Some Dysfunctional Pyramids Shadow IT? The Business App Portfolio; Siloed & Foundationless Increasing Impact to Children OPERATIONAL “Helping the Organization Run” Buy, Co-op & COTS

21. Some Dysfunctional Pyramids Shadow IT? The Front-line Service Org; The Disconnected Field Connect & Deliver PROGRAM “Improving Program Delivery” Increasing Impact to Children

22. Some Dysfunctional Pyramids Helping save more lives; 1:1 need fulfillment Impact! Pilot & Build CHILD “Differentiating” Increasing Impact to Children

23. So what type of IT are you in a crisis? • Are we going to be about only saving costs or saving twice the children? • That fundamentally is the key, the hinge on which NGO IT strategy turns. Increasing Impact to Children

24. We Need to Push the Pyramid at Both Ends Get in Competitive or Leading CHILD “Differentiating” PROGRAM “Improving Program Delivery” Increasing Impact to Children OPERATIONAL “Helping the Organization Run” Efficient FOUNDATIONAL “Keeping the Lights On” Get out

25. Corporate indicators?

26. What if we continue down the path of following our for-profit colleagues. Will the tried and true work for the NGO world?

27. Nonprofits get by with a fifth (or less) of corp. IT costs 5x 18x 4x 27 27

28. IF 57% of ERP projects don't realize their ROI (Nucleus Research) 66% IT projects fail (Standish Chaos DB) NGOs spend a 20th what corporations do (Tuck survey) And we are spending donors’ dollars THEN We must find a better way... Non Profit IT Departments Can’t Play the Odds 28

29. Key Conclusion: we can’t do it Even if nonprofits tripled IT spending, they would still be playing catch-up for just keeping the lights on. 29

30. Bottom line? We need to collaborate or perish!

31. Collaboration: The NetHope Case

32. NetHope’s Members … an organization that works 32 Collaborating in Challenging Times!

33. Collaborating is about trust and humility “Who has expertise I can trust? Shared Specialization Joint Projects “What can we build together?” Increasing Levels of Trust Partnering “How can we work with corporations?” Basic Info Sharing “What are my peers doing?”

34. NetHope Vision To be a catalyst for collaboration in the International NGO community and enable best use of technology for connecting in the developing parts of the world Connected Together, Changing the World

35. External Collaboration Will Drive the Internal Agenda Why NetHope as a collaboration works? We have… • History: NetHope has been at it for 8 years: building trust since 2001 • Hunger: NGO IT are beggars – don’t underestimate value of under-funding • Humility: extending trust to centers of excellence in other members • Partnering: corporate partners buy-in to the leverage of collaboration and having impact with technology

36. NetHope’s Major Partners and Supporters … Our Partners Our Supporters 36 Collaborating in Challenging Times!

37. Learn to love the questions

38. Some Poke-in-the-Eye Questions • Why are we still running our own email? – Ron Markezich forecast • Why are we running our own help desks? • Why do we need a server, period? –Chris Thomas • Why haven't we changed our program delivery significantly in past 30 years? • Why do Imagine Cup students develop more field-based IT innovation in 9 months than nonprofits in 5 years? • Why is Cisco able to cut travel 50% and increase customer contacts 20-30% and we can't approach that with our Field?

39. Six questions for Nonprofit CIOs • What new programs (that directly serve beneficiaries) have you helped engender that would not have been possible without the new use of technology? • What have you done to help close the "productivity gap" in the way your nonprofit delivers programs and operates as an organization? • How have you helped bridge the divide that will be caused by disruptive innovations in the nonprofit space? • For relief organizations: How have you helped disaster response be 50% faster with 50% greater impact? • How have you helped your organization attract and retain knowledge workers (and IT professionals) in the face of crisis of the baby boom generation retirement wave? • What are you doing to move commodity functions out of your organization and contribute time, dollars and support to the truly value-added functions of your agency?

40. Five Take-aways • We need to be more than “lights-on” in nonprofits • Have a dream and don’t cut it • NGOs cannot follow in the footsteps of corporations • Collaborate or perish • Ask good questions

42. Further Reading • Blogs: http://eghapp.blogspot.com/ http://granger-happ.blogspot.com/(Dartmouth Fellowship) • Web site: http://www.fairfieldreview.org/hpmd/EGHprofile.nsf • Email: ehapp@savechildren.org • Twitter: @ehapp • And the book: Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission, chap. 11.

43. Questions?

44. Appendix • Additional detail slides

45. CCitDG Annual Conference 2009, October 7th to 9th ‘Making a Difference in Interesting Times’ The theme of the conference is "Making a Difference in Interesting Times". Current economic conditions are just as challenging for charities as for any other organisation, with issues including falling income from donors, falling interest on reserves and, for those working overseas, increased costs due to falling exchange rates. For all our members (and we're talking CIOs and IT directors) this has meant a big change to their ‘status quo’. Times are tough, budgets are being cut but more significantly there is an increased level of uncertainty, the future is less clear, plans are being consistently torn-up and re-made and so forth. However challenging times often present more opportunities and in the more effective organisations, CIOs are engaged with the whole leadership team in turning adversity into advantage, plotting the path for their charity through the ‘recession’ and positioning their charity to emerge stronger; others are merely hanging on and hoping! So the conference will explore ways in which we, as CIOs and IT Directors, can really make a difference to an organisation’s performance during these challenging times. The approach we have taken in organizing the event has been to give all the speakers a similar brief and invite them to tackle this from their perspective, so we have: - Board Level - Ed Granger Happ - Finance Director – Mark Hallam - Sector Consultant - Chris Tiernan - Leading Research Organisation – Dave Aron - Supplier Viewpoint – Stuart Monk - Looking to the Future - Peter Cochrane - Soft Skills - Diana Gomick

46. An introduction • I’m Ed Granger-Happ ehapp@savechildren.org • Some things on my resume: • I spent 13 years on Wall Street & 10 running my own management consulting business --both in IT • I’ve been at Save the Children 9 years • Save the Children is my third career • Some things not on my resume: • I was born on Mother’s Day • I have two step-sons, David (18) and Scott (15) • I like to exercise my right brain with creative writing (see www.fairfieldreview.org)

47. In the beginning, there was the vision Imagine this: Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Bumper sticker version: All the information for all the people, now

48. Six strategic questions ED/CEOs should ask • How can we ensure Convergence rather than Divergence? • How do we balance innovation and foundation building? process and work-flow applications, and reserve some • What’s the technology future and what’s the past? • How do we meet near-term business needs while building for the long term? • How do we invest enough and not too much? • From where will disruptive innovations come for nonprofits come?

49. Relentless Focus on the Goal…

50. Who Are Our Customers? HQ Depts Organization Donors, Grantors Program Designer Field Worker Corporations Field Child IT Dept.