The Coincidence

Today, I ended up somehow on Jillaine Smith's blog. She posted to one of the myriad lists I read every day, recommending a global management consulting firm's reports on managing information technology. Here's Jillaine summing up the Mackensie firm's points:

In order for choices about and investments in IT initiatives to be successful...

   

1. They must be driven by organizational objectives
2. Leadership must take responsibility for their success
3. They should be combined with investments in building management capacity

My partner Gilda and I have spent a lot of time and energy pondering these issues. We're pretty clear about what we want to do, point one, and our partners in Nepal are, too. Lumanti wants to help the poor, and RCRD (whose name is so long and such socio-speak that I'm just going to let it go at this) wants to help the disabled and the people who live with and near them.

I wonder if the database I created for Lumanti last spring was entirely driven by their organizational objectives, but it's clear that leadership didn't take responsibility for the success of the project. I was fresh out of college, see, and management buy-in was a buzzword. I used it when I talked to my Nepali partners and they nodded earnestly, but the ownership wasn't there...or it wasn't sustained from half the world and half a year away.

It's the building management capacity that Gilda and I want to factor into our strategic planning. She's the expert on nonprofit management; I'm just the fledgling techie with a passion for crossing cultures. There's a great little bar graph there about how important it is to combine IT with Management Capacity building to get the best results for the organization.

The next piece on Jillaine's blog was also right on. "Conditions of Ownership" spoke right to a conversation I was having with my board member Scott about the difference between the meetings he's used to, where management mouths a desire to listen to the employees, and the way the whole group at his voluntary workplace, Ten Thousand Villages, functions. There, he feels he's making a contribution and that his contribution is heard and his ideas valued. I immediately emailed the link to Jillaine's piece to Scott.

What's the coincidence? Three hours later, I get an email from Emily from the Nonprofit Blog Exchange telling me it's time for our next blog exchange. Who's my chosen partner? Jillaine Smith's At the Intersection. For a huge field, it's still a small world.