Reflecting and Rebuilding

Anyone who’s read my blog lately will know that three months ago I bought my first house. Since then, most of my free time has gone into making it a home (and thus my excuse for not blogging more regularly). Lately, I have been setting up my studio, where I make my art: mixed media, collage and drawings. There’s something nice about setting up your old studio in a new place. It’s both a reflective and a refreshing time. In a way, it isn’t much different than the changes I’ll be going through once we have a new CEO in my org.

I loved my old studio, it was better than the prior one because I had extra shelves and a table with casters I can roll around to maximize space. That’s not to say it couldn’t have been better, but once I set it up, I focused on making work – not on changing it around all the time. The same thing happens with organizations, right? But while I can change anything I want in my studio, that’s not usually the case in a corporate environment.

There, what seem like simple decisions can become difficult to implement. Many of my projects end up looking very different than when first conceived – be it a matter of time, funding, priorities, you name it. Some things never get done. As the list of projects gets longer, so does the number of things you haven’t been able to change. Perhaps you don’t add as many new ideas to the list. Perhaps you wait for the new fiscal year to make a new list. Perhaps, like in our case, you wait for a new CEO.

Suddenly, you get “the new boss”. You are hopeful they will bring about change, but you are also skeptical, maybe even a little cynical, and if you are like me, you start getting a little defensive. Maybe you try to lay blame on budget cuts, or a vendor, or an old piece of software. You worry whether your staff will be safe, whether you’ve made the right political moves within the organization, and whether any of that will matter to the new CEO.

You know the new boss will ask a lot of questions about why things are the way they are. You’ll have to explain how previous years’ events affected the decisions that lead you to this point. You have to think about why you hung the studio shelves to the right instead of to the left, why your storage bins are piled up as they are, why your sketchbooks are so disorganized. And so the budget cuts, the staff cuts, the changing priorities, all those things that you never though were “your fault” somehow end up being “your portfolio” when a new CEO walks in. Yikes.

All of these change management issues seem rather selfish and petty when you consider the big picture: are we serving our customers the best way possible? Are we living up to our mission? Either we are, or we’re not.

It’s like making art, when it’s done, your work is either strong or it’s not. When people walk into the gallery and look at your work, they should not care what tools you used, if they were new or old, if you had enough money to buy the best paper or if you substituted, if you framed it yourself or outsourced it. Why should anyone care? It’s your work that matters, not the tools you used and not the circumstances under which you made it.

But getting a new CEO does afford you that opportunity to make significant changes going forward. Unlike in my little studio, having the right tools and resources does make a difference in a corporate environment. Circumstances (and organizational culture) do matter if changing them will help deliver a better product, a better service.

So I’m going to continue working on my studio at home, and hope to do the same at work. The new studio isn’t going to be completely different, of course. I still have my trusty old table that I’ve had for years. It’s good, it works, and it’s not going away. I’ll still have the same pictures of my grandparents hanging on the wall. But I do need more shelves, and I should re-organize my drawing papers. It’s time to dust off my art books and remind myself of how the old masters did their best work, sharpen those pencils again and get back to work with a renewed sense of excitement!

“Painting With” Social Media

I just bought a house, so there’s been a lot of painting going on lately. Inevitably, painting and social media seem to meld in my sleep and I dream about social media painting tools. Actually, I think there is a parallel to be made between home improvement and “getting started” with social media.

It’s been a while since I needed to paint walls. Not so for my mother, “miss DIY”. She introduced me to two new tools, the edger… and whatever the other edger thingee is called. One has little wheels on it and you put it up to the edge of the adjacent wall, and ta-da, a perfectly clean paint line. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I couldn’t wait to use it! My husband, on the other hand, was a bit more apprehensive. He likes hand painting the edges with a small brush, like he’s done for years. I think that process is slow, it leaves a different texture on the wall, and you make more mistakes.

So I went off to work with my cool new edger while he tackled the other walls, brush in hand. I quickly realized that no matter how good or capable the tool is, if your wall is crooked you still end up with a crooked paint line. The same bumps you encounter with the brush are still on the wall for the edger. You just make the same crooked line with a different tool. Needless to say, I was too quick to assume the latest tool would perform miracles, although it did a really good job overall and saved me time. The next time we painted, my husband used the edger, and I cleaned up the problem spots with a trusty old brush!

I think it’s easy to see where I’m going with this. We can all get caught up with the latest social media tools, or the latest networking sites, forgetting that they are just that, tools. They’re not going to work magic for us, and we still need a plan with objectives, tactics, and a way to measure success (or learning opportunities!) We can’t start engaging our communities with social technology by just creating a Facebook account, and launching a social media strategy requires as much consideration of planning, execution and reporting as other, more traditional strategies (though perhaps not as much as an ERP replacement!)

So let me talk about our “painting strategy”. My husband and I didn’t start off by opening a can of paint in the middle of the bedroom!

• We knew why we wanted to paint the bedroom (the existing paint was old and dingy). What objectives are you trying to accomplish by using social media? What is your mission?
• We knew what brand of paint we wanted to use: we’d used it before successfully. What are you doing now to build relationships with your communities, and how can social media compliment that, not replace it?
• We picked “moderate” colors because we didn’t want to tire of them in a year. Are your social media efforts simple enough to achieve and measure, or will you still be working on them this time next year?
• We planned to paint the rooms in a specific order and coordinated our unpacking around that. Plan your social media rollout so you can actually manage it instead of being overwhelmed by it. Coordinate it with other efforts you are making to reach the same goals: email campaigns, print mailers, community events, etc.
• We got the right tools needed to get the job done. What sites will be more appropriate to reach your audience? Are they on Twitter or on Senior.com? Will you need mobile apps? Do you need to manage multiple accounts at the same time?
• We put on two coats and retouched the edges till we got it right. Or at least pretty close. Let’s face it, the previous owners left their presence on the baseboard. You don’t have to strive for perfection, just know what your goals are and be reasonable about reaching them.
• In the middle of all this, we bought a can of paint that was too dark, and exchanged it. We loved the color, but knew it would not work with the overall room. Don’t get stuck doing things one way: evaluate as you go along and make changes where needed.

Lastly, I should mention that we also put down some plastic in case we made a big mess.

I feel a whole series of home improvement/social media blog posts coming on! If you enjoyed this one, pass it along.

Gloria Steinem for the Chicago Foundation for Women

Last week, I was fortunate to be invited to the 24th Annual Chicago Foundation for Women luncheon in Chicago. I was really looking forward to hearing Dr. Maya Angelou speak, but unfortunately she had been hospitalized and could not make the event. I hope she’s doing much better! So we had the privilege of listening to Gloria Steinem instead (boo-hoo, right?)

Click to view video of Gloria Steinem at CFW

I never heard Gloria speak before, but at age 75 she has not lost one bit of the spunk she is known for. I should have turned on my flip camera earlier in her speech, but I was laughing too hard. Thankfully, the CFW recently posted their videos, along with her great list of birthday wishes. One of my favorite ones is on marriage equality: “I want all grown-ups to be able to get married as long as they don’t hit each other.”

But everything is not funny when we are faced with some of the harsh realities that girls and women face across the world, and even in our own metropolitan cities. Hearing about a pregnant teen in Chicago who was arranging to pay $10 each to her girlfriends to kick her repeatedly in the stomach, so she could lose her baby, just made me sick.. and sad.

On the way home from this powerful and inspirational event, I thought about all the women I work with. I realized that I spend far too much time competing against many of them, when we could be collaborating instead. After all, we work for the same cause! But that is often easier said than done, and there isn’t much merit in blaming men for that, either. Just in case you were thinking of doing it…

So I think I can (and should) be better at working with my “fellow” women (no pun intended). If I only took one thing from the event is that it’s great to network with women in those settings, but I can’t forget about the ones I see every day, or the ones that don’t have the opportunity to even think about attending events.

Being at the luncheon was a good experience because I had the opportunity to network with other strong women leaders in the fields, but at the end of the day I felt a bit like Cinderella: the clock struck 1:30PM and I dashed off to my broom and mop… ehr… to deal with software problems, vendors who needed time, and a plethora of politically charged meetings that required attention. C’est la vie!

As a shameless plug, you can follow the CFW on Facebook and I would strongly urge you to support their work in Chicago. It’s very needed!

I just deleted my strategy!

I had a particularly quiet morning today, no pressing deadlines or major problems. Those days are few and far in between, aren’t they? So being the organized neat-freak that I am, I decided to clean out my inbox and archive the inbox folders I was no longer using. I love doing that. I really can do more fun things with my personal time, but that’s for another blog.

 

So there I was, archiving and removing folders, when I suddenly became aware of a pattern that troubled me. I started writing down the names of the folders I was removing just to make sure I wasn’t being overly pessimistic (a genetic trait). When I was done, I was left mostly with folders for internal departments or external vendors. I realized that most of what I removed were folders for projects that “never went anywhere”. I have a folder on the department’s shared drive called the same thing, I am just waiting for my boss to find that one…

 

Here’s a sample of what I removed:

 

• Business Process Improvement
• Computerized Maintenance Management System
• Customer Relationship Management
• Voyager 2.0 (ideas for major usability enhancements for our ERP until its replacement) 
• Document Imaging
• Preventing Duplicate Member Records
• Process Improvement Ideas
• IT Steering Committee
• Mentoring
• Online Program Registration & Membership Sales
• Regional Training Program
• Strategic Planning

 

At first glance, these just look like a list of projects, right? But when I compare them to my new inbox structure, one thing stands out. We have moved from projects that benefit the entire org, to department-based work. That’s not to say that Finance or Marketing don’t have valid technology needs, not at all. But this segregation of projects is troubling. Sure, we’re still doing “work”. But based simply on this folder structure I would argue that our technology investments are not addressing our larger, longer term needs. Do we not need to manage our members’ information anymore? Can we no longer benefit from a centralized document imaging system? The mentoring folder was easy to delete, it only had one email in it, nothing more ever came of that. But what about the regional training program… or Strategic Planning?! Do we not need to be part of that anymore?

 

I don’t need to think too much about how we got here. To me, it’s obvious. Without a CIO sitting at the senior management table, IT’s role is once again to keep the wheels running. Keep the electricity on, keep email going, fix daily problems. Sure, that’s part of our role. But without being fully engaged (or even present) at the decision making level, the ongoing struggle to align IT with the rest of the org is becoming increasingly obvious. At least to my inbox.

 

How much longer can we afford to be back in service-only mode before we can switch to value-added mode again? Is a new CIO the answer? I think not. Most people could not take on so much change management on their own (excluding maybe Gandhi and Mother Theresa). It takes the whole village, as they say. But I do believe that change can start at the top. We are currently looking for a new CEO, and I am anxious to see what new leadership will bring. I want to see how they will listen, think, and act… what changes will be in store for us, and how staff and volunteers will be able to participate in the shaping of the next generation of leaders.

 

I want my strategic planning folder back. And full.

Is Managing Technology Like Playing “Bejeweled”?

I admit it, I’m addicted to the computer game Bejeweled. I’ve been playing it every day when I get home so I can “brain dump” after work. The more I play it, the more I realize it’s just like my job! Let’s get this out of the way first: I manage software development for a large nonprofit. OK, now on to Bejeweled.

Bejeweled game by Pop Cap

The version I play is a one-minute game where you have rows and columns of different types of “gems”. If you line up three of a kind, you get points. The gems disappear and the ones above them fall, rearranging themselves and your next opportunity to match them up. If you line up four, five, you get more points, etc. Every now and then you get some “2x” or “3x” wild card. You get the point. So here’s my theory:

• One approach is to make many 3-gem matches quickly, and just “get it done”. That will lead to more actions but fewer points. Likewise, in project management you can get a lot of projects done quickly, but they won’t yield a higher value. More work does not equal more value.
• Another approach is to “step back”, look at the whole board, try to see the big picture. This is much like IT strategic planning. It’s necessary to have the vision, but at some point you need to start moving pieces (i.e. making tactical progress) in order to move forward. If I said “in order to score”, would it sound inappropriate? You need a good balance between strategy and execution.
• Every now and then you get extra-shiny gems to distract you. I liken them to new software tools, or gadgets. Beware of the shiny-object syndrome.
• Often, right after you make a 3-gem match you realize there was the possibility of a bigger match – a split second too late! You could have gotten more points for moving left than for moving right, but instead you took the first – and therefore the only – option. It’s the same for “quick fix” projects. They often end up requiring the same amount of time as a better solution. If you had been just a little more thoughtful the return on investment would have been higher. Quick decisions aren’t always smart decisions.
• Sometimes you get in a roll and knock those babies out, you see the whole board, clear as day, each move is smart and you totally score. There, I said it. You get that in a job, too. You get the job done, and you’ve done it well. Post that high score in your profile! Share your achievements, build your own worth.
• Other times you end up staring at the screen for 10, 20 seconds. In a 60 second game that’s a long time! You end up with a very low score and frustrated at your lack of progress. It’s like trying to argue the same point over and over with the same people. You can’t fight every battle. Move on.
• This weird thing happens every now and then. You get a lighting bolt that shoots out and kills a tons of your gems. In Bejeweled that’s a good thing, because you score points. But in technology management, I liken that to a change in management. For example, you have all your projects lined up, things are humming right along, and all of a sudden your org undergoes a significant change. Perhaps someone leaves, your budget gets cut, or a new person comes in with a completely different philosophy. Crap, there goes all your planning. Change can be great, but man, does it screw things up! Adapt.

Here is my last thought on this. Bejeweled games are only 60 seconds long, but so addictive that I end up playing for an hour because I keep wanting a higher score. It’s like my job – year after year I keep at it because I want to do it better. But is Bejeweled more like a job than a career? All you do is move pieces. Obviously it’s good to strive for improvement, particularly in an organization whose mission you love. But what about innovation, or professional growth? The org is always going to need people to move pieces around, but this can become detrimental to your career. At what point do you stop moving pieces and start developing your own game?

What are some of your thoughts?

What is this “mission ” stuff, anyway? Part Two.

In Part One of this blog I pretty much blamed Steve Heye (our Web Project Manager) for making me question my understanding of “the mission”. So why is that?

Steve is a Y guy. The Y is in his blood, he wreaks of it. He grew up at the Indian Boundary YMCA and never left (at least in his heart). You can read more about him here, but my point is that he knows the mission. He gets it, because it has been a part of him since he was a kid. He knows how child care and day camp programs teach core values and developmental assets; how camping builds independence and self esteem; that the bonds you make with the other campers will be for life. He understands the power of being part of a swim team because his kids are in them and he knows you have to invest four hours on Saturdays to watch your kid swim for ten minutes. He understands about the difference volunteering in your community makes, because he does it with his family. So when Steve shows up for a web meeting, for example, he brings all of those years of personal experience with the YMCA mission to the table. He can focus on how to align technology with the mission because he really gets it.

Flickr photo by doc macaSTAT

In thinking about this post, I wondered where I missed out on opportunities to become more familiar with our mission, or if they even existed for me as an employee. When I worked in HR, I had been an admin assistant for less than a year before they asked me to implement a Y2K-compliant payroll system. Yes, you read that right. It was my first full time job, I was just out of college and 24 years old, making abut $11/hr and someone put me in charge of my first payroll system implementation. That’s a typical accidental-techie story.

 

Needless to say I was a bit busy after that… but in 2001 those systems were pretty established and I moved on to project management in the IT department. I was the only one who didn’t work with our legacy ERP or fixed computers. I mostly programmed Lotus Notes databases for a few years and automated many of our paper processes, and tried to streamline them. Maybe I did not stop often enough to ask why we did things a certain way, although I don’t recall an overwhelming desire by the Association to undergo any more major changes – they had just done a brand new membership system implementation that rocked their worlds like nothing before. So I spent a lot of time in my cube at the corporate offices. I travelled to the centers a few times to train people how to use the new PO system, etc. Not what you would call a “full immersion” into the mission.

 

I implemented a few more off the shelf systems until I was promoted in 2004. I inherited all the software development for our ERP and my life was a living hell. I like to think I took it all in stride and made a good impact on our processes. But it sucked the life out of me from 2005 through mid 2008. I cannot recall many days where I had the luxury of leaving the office to go “learn” about our work. I had hundreds of overdue projects to prioritize, almost everything was broken, people hated, REALLY REALLY HATED,  the system,

Flickr photo by pea2wenty3

and I reported to a CFO that – oddly enough – cared almost exclusively about cutting cost and mitigating risk. Her only “mission” was to save us from bankruptcy, and all her staff focused on that.

Once I went on a trip to the Camp Duncan YMCA’s“Burn Camp”, now called “Camp I Am Me”, for children with disfiguring burns. I had been encouraged by our COO to go to the closing ceremony, so I volunteered in the kitchen, and that was something I will never forget. It was an awesome experience that made me want to cry. One colleague that had wanted to come with me, but could not, was later accused of trying to slack off (paraphrasing). She caught so much flack just for asking to go, that she never tried to attend a function during work hours again. That’s the environment I worked in for years.

It really wasn’t until early 2008 that things changed for me. Over the years, I had built my little nook at the Y. My department ran the way I wanted it to, on most days, even if sacrificing quality and best practices for quick fixes was commonplace. But most people were not screaming, the system was reliable, and we could start to focus on delivering value, not just repairs. My CFO left and I ended up working for a couple other EVP’s. During this time, I was able to get to the centers more, and it gave me a chance to meet different staff. In 2009, the change has been incredible. I have gotten out to many of our business cabinets: sports, aquatics, day camp, etc. and met with staff from all our business lines. I think the epitome was a couple of months ago when I was at the Elmhurst YMCA, just working away in a borrowed office, when a lifeguard stopped by to get some supplies and we struck up a conversation about the website project. Something like that, so simple and straight-forward, had not happened before.

So in my ten years at the YMCA, it hasn’t been until the last year or so that I have been able to make enough time to really learn about the mission. And that’s still it – I learn about it like from a book, I don’t live it. I do find myself learning new things about our programs and services every day, and thinking about the ways in which I would have managed things differently if I had taken the time to listen to more staff more often, and not just take direction from a few senior managers. I think it’s my job to make sure there is a good balance between tactic and strategy, but when your core systems need so much attention, the problems take over. I cannot emphasize enough the value of having stable systems that are user friendly, coupled with the proper training and systems for consistent feedback to really allow IT to align technology with the delivery of the mission. I also would never have never gotten to this point without making friends with center staff along the way; those people that will tell you honestly what they think, and even though they require more attention and won’t ever call the help desk… they are the ones that help me better understand the role our technology plays in their daily work.

As a final note, I need to recommend you read Steve Heye’s blog on IT Alignment, as well as the NTEN’s book “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission”, which is great for both technical staff and “C” level leadership. It also has a useful wiki and an upcoming web summit  with great speakers.

Flickr photo by Judith Sol-Dyess

What is this “mission” stuff, anyway? Part One.

Part One

I’ve been struggling with our mission lately. Well, not so much with “it” as with my understanding of “it”. I’ll explain. I’ve been with my org for ten years, first in Human Resources and now in Technology. My org has not changed its basic mission in 150 years. Yes, we’ve gotten more inclusive, expanded services, etc. But we are still basically known for our health and fitness brand, swimming and day camp. OK, I’ll just say it— I work for the YMCA. The YMCA of Metro Chicago, specifically. I would not describe us as a “cause”, though others may disagree (feel free to comment). But we do much more “human services” work than anyone could ever guess, including services from age 6 to the day you pass away from old age, from gang intervention, pre-natal care counseling for teens, mental health, youth homelessness, to home health care for seniors. You name it, we probably do it. Still, many people don’t think of the YMCA as a nonprofit. But I would say that our membership centers carry out the mission in their own way, which is inherently differently than our government funded programs. Everyone is here to build strong kids, strong families, and strong communities. I just included that in my voice mail message today, for the first time in ten years.

Why did it take me so long to do that? What is it about our mission that I am uncomfortable with? I get the gist of it, don’t get me wrong. But after ten years, I still don’t get much of the “delivery”. I’ve been really troubled by this lately, and I solely blame Steve Heye for that. I guess I should explain that too… later. First, let me say that I did not grow up near a YMCA. In fact, I grew up in Spain where there wasn’t a Y. My family, friends, teachers and neighbors were my community, I was on a first name basis with everyone from the school principal to the butcher, and all my activities took place in a small town environment. My only experience with the YMCA before I was hired was from when I used to work for a messenger service. There, my HR counterpart feltskittish about hiring someone who lived at 30 W. Chicago, at the Lawson House YMCA. That just wasn’t a “good thing” to her, and therefore my only exposure to the Y had been negative. That greatly changed when I started working there, of course.

Another factor that kept me separate from my local YMCA when I first moved to Chicago is that we didn’t have any money. It sounds so silly to say that now, knowing all thefinancial assistance YMCA’s provide! But back then, we just didn’t know, or think to ask. Something else: as I grew up, and even now at my ripe old age of 34, I don’t have kids. Until four months ago I didn’t even have a nephew, or any other babies in the family that I saw regularly. In fact, I didn’t even like kids very much, so the “build strong children” part of the mission was lost on me. The family part was, too. I am not particularly close to my family in Chicago. I enjoy them enough, but mostly on designated holidays. My parents divorced when my mother, sister and I moved to Chicago, and my father never left Spain. So the family I had known all my life was now across the Atlantic, and I had a brand new one in Chicago, just as large and complex. I also had to learn English and go to school, which kept me pretty busy at home. My mother became a single parent and my concept of “family” changed pretty radically. But I never connected the YMCA to that. Why would I?

So I am not surprised that the YMCA never came across my life until I was an employee. What has been bothering me though, is why after ten years of working there, I am still so surprised at all that we do. Just last week I had meetings with our new web development partners and three of our different program areas, and I probably learned almost as much as they did. How could that be? Was there some point in my employment where I had the opportunity to learn more about the mission, and missed it? Should I regret passing up the operations position I was jokingly offered too early in my tenure? If I had not gone to work in the small technology department of a technologically-challenged non profit, where would I be today? Would I have been able to better impact the YMCA?

That’s where Steve Heye comes in…

To Be Continued.

Making Media Connections at CWM

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Community Media Workshop at Columbia College in Chicago. The two-day event, “Making Media Connections”, introduced me to some of the complexities of journalism, particularly around new media. I originally attended because of my interest in social media, and I knew Beth Kanter would be presenting some sessions, but I also found myself completely submerged in the media topics that were part of the second day’s roundtables.

In a way, journalists’ roles are going through the same types of transformation as IT ones. “Old” media like print newspapers and radio co-existing (and in some cases struggling) with “new” web-based newspapers, bloggers and hyper local news sites. It’s similar to what I see happening in technology with the changing roles of CIO’s, a topic well described by NTEN’s Holly Ross in this blog, where she quotes from TechRepublic’s insightful article “The CIO is Dead (Long Live the CIO)“.

Like journalists, technologists can’t simply continue to work in the same model that was successful ten years ago. We can’t only manage the infrastructure, or the software development of our ERP –  we need to do more than just keep the lights on. We must adapt and find new ways with which to deliver value to our organizations. Increasingly, that value is through the strategic use of social media. I have met many people in organizations that understand that need, but struggle with how to get started. Many are ready to jump in (or have already) without a plan, and try the old spaghetti-on-the-wall approach. Others are going to miss the boat because their orgs are too afraid to fail, so they end up in “analysis paralysis”. I must admit I’m happy to be between these two places.

In my org, we’ve written a short strategic plan and executive summary for social networks (not for social media yet). We’ve partnered with our Risk Management department to make sure we address concerns around social media’s impact on the youth we serve. We are drafting an HR policy for employees to properly represent us online. We are incorporating social media issues into our existing risk management trainings and creating new trainings to introduce staff to basic social networking concepts and tools. Last, but not least, we started cataloging our online presence using www.delicious.com.

After this week’s session, however, I need to go back to the drawing table a bit. Beth Kanter’s “Social Media Listening and Literacy for Nonprofits” showed me that we need a better listening strategy. We also need a good “response”, or engagement, strategy that can be used by staff monitoring or participating in various sites. Beth references a good, short article on that topic from Social Media Today. Engagement, for us, is part of a communications strategy that we will work with Marketing & P/R to draft. So… the work is never done, of course, everything is a work in progress. I find the toughest part is to actually progress in an organization where “old tech” projects are still king (expected, budgeted, and certainly in need of maintenance!)

Thanks to CMW for a nice, thoughtful conference, and to Beth for all the information she provided. It’s always great to learn new things, but reiterating the building blocks is just as important, and this conference provided a great balance between the two.

The Original Social Network

Recently, I spent a few weeks in Spain visiting my father’s side of the family, where I grew up.  Only two of a dozen relatives use a home computer, so I had been looking forward to “escaping” technology work and problems, but I was a little disappointed to bid farewell to my social networks. The only technology I took with me was a digital camera, my iPod for the flight, and a new flip video camera I had just bought.

A few days into the trip I had a conversation with my cousin about using Twitter for work. He understood, but wasn’t entirely sold on it for his business needs. A few days later, my aunt asked me why all these people she didn’t know were trying to friend her on Facebook, and what was that anyway? My uncle had created an account under her name and she didn’t know much else. My other uncle logs in to Facebook every now and then for new pictures of my baby nephew, and besides my sister and I, only has two friends on Facebook (and he couldn’t care less). My 80 year old grandmother asked me what YouTube is because she had seen some strange videos on the news, and I tried to explain – but she really wasn’t interested when she realized it had to do with “computers”.

So, as is often the case, I was feeling rather “technologically superior” to my relatives, particularly around social media and social networking. I rarely talk about work or technology with my family, and I wasn’t interested in venturing into discussing social networking, something I knew they just wouldn’t understand. What I quickly realized, though, was that I am part of the oldest social network in the world: the family.

My 84 year old grandfather has breakfast at the same place almost every day, and we walk there together when I visit. He buys the same newspaper at the same news stand every day, and goes next door to read it with his coffee and a pastry. Every day since I left Spain twenty years ago, my grandfather reads the previous day’s weather for Chicago. I always know that wherever I am, no matter how different our routines, our age and experiences, we are connected at least once a day. Now that’s a “friend”.

Going back to Spain always reminds me that the basic, simple things in life still work, and that technology doesn’t build or strengthen networks, people do. For example, just having lunch and talking to people. My first day back we had sixteen people, from six to eighty-six years old, sitting down to lunch beneath the share of a walnut tree, sharing and laughing for hours. I took pictures with a digital camera and had to show every single one of them on the LCD screen so relatives could tell me exactly which ones to print out for them and mail back – because they want them in their hands, to look at when they visit each other, and not on a computer screen.

I have been back in Chicago for a week, and haven’t really logged in to Twitter. I can tell you that I don’t miss it like I miss my family, my first and strongest network.

What to do while I hold… for a CEO.

My non profit is going through some significant management changes. A few weeks ago, our CEO of eight years announced his intent to retire. Then our EVP of Human Services resigned. We have not had a head of financial development for several months, and we’ve been without a CIO (my boss) since February.

Don’t get me wrong, I love change. I think many of these are great opportunities to reshape the way we work; not so much what we do, but how we do it. It’s an exciting time, and opportunities are endless. However, we’ve had so much change lately that it seems the only constant is being “on hold”. With the CEO search underway, major initiatives are understandably on hold. But what are we to do while we wait? Specifically, what could I be doing?

My CIO left in February, so our hold time is already longer, and when he left, so did our budget. Our technology was already years behind the times for a variety of reasons, but at least our CIO had a great vision and developed our first technology strategic plan. He spent weeks surveying technology: software, hardware and the network, to be sure, but more importantly, he talked to the people who use our technology. He didn’t just talk to them about technology per say, but about their goals, their challenges and opportunities. At the end (or the beginning, depending on how you look at it) we had a vision, a plan, a budget and, for the first time ever, exposure and support from the board. With a few exceptions, that is all on hold now.

Our ERP replacement is on hold for the fourth time since 2006. Talking about it to staff, other NPO’s, and vendors is simply embarrassing. Our HRIS upgrade is on hold again, so our management has no access to manage employees, they just get weekly “rank and number” reports. Our email migration is on hold for the third time, which means our Lotus Notes database replacement is also on hold, and 84% of staff remain without email. So while we’re on hold for the next two years (give or take 2-4 months to replace each “C” position) we continue to live with inefficient systems. Just as importantly though, we continue to live with “broken processes”. The perfect thing for us to be doing right now, while we’re on hold, would be to improve our processes.

I will not be the first techie to say that IT Alignment is much more important than hardware or software, but we all know that change management is difficult. I will not get detailed about these complex topics here, but this is certainly true for my org. Because continuous process improvement is not part of our culture, and so much technology needs to be upgraded or replaced, we could be headed for serious trouble if we only focused on software. As the saying goes… “Adding technology to a bad process only adds speed to a very bad process” As I see it, there are several benefits to embracing process improvement in our org:

• Tactical: it would force us to evaluate how we do the work we do – to measure whether our technology can meet tomorrow’s goals, not just repeat the way “we’ve always done things”.
• Cultural: It would help us create a culture where change management is welcome and sought, not avoided or feared.
• Financial: we could do it now because planning doesn’t have to cost money, beyond staff time.
• Technological: not having process improvement tied to a budget means we can’t jump directly to a purchase or implementation, which would force people to understand the difference (or, as my CIO used to say, “process before technology”)
• Strategic: recognizing where we have problems isn’t something I want my new CEO or CIO to do for me – I live here, this is my house to clean up. Instead of waiting for new leadership, we should identify our problems and turn them into opportunities for them. If I was going to be a CEO (God help us all)… would I rather walk into an org that realized its challenges and wanted to change, or would I want to start telling people what they are doing wrong, only to have staff resent that?
• Social: if you are a funder, wouldn’t you rather fund an org that purposely and continually maximizes your investment?

A few months before our CIO left, we had started a BPI process that most people were really excited about, but which was cancelled (not just put on hold) when he left. We were told that process improvement is only a good exercise on paper, and that knowing what you have today (your current state) isn’t very important. I was actually told not to use the word “process”! That’s the last time we talked about process improvement in my org, so the question now is how to re-start this conversation in a more positive light, and without fear of retribution.

It will be challenging to have this discussion while the current CEO is transitioning, which could take months. What I am trying to do, in part, is to change the culture of the past eight years, and that will be difficult while he still oversees things. I am rather curious to see what the new CEO’s position about process improvement (and of course, technology overall) will be. I wonder what the interview process is like for a new CEO coming into an org like ours – one that lists technology as one of the top priorities of the strategic plan, yet has drastically reduced the IT budget, and stopped almost all projects since February.

Lastly, I would hope the new CEO isn’t afraid to hire another great CIO and can do it quickly. Better yet, bring ours back! (A selfish plea, I know, but it’s my blog). I hope we don’t have to rely on another set of consultants for months, doing the same types of analysis already done, asking the same people the same questions for the third or fourth time, and validating what we already know. This might sound a little bitter, but it’s not. I simply hope our previous work does not go by the wayside. While I value the unique experience and approach some consultants bring to the table, I would hope that our staff experience is valued first and foremost. My two-person department has a collective experience of more than 20 years in the same org!

That sounds like a good topic for my next post…