5 Steps to Create an Information Strategy for Your Organization

Editor's Notes

• #2: Welcome to our webinar for August 2019, presented as a partnership between Build Consulting and Community IT Innovators. Today’s topic is “5 Steps to Create an Information Strategy for Your Organization.” We received a number of excellent questions, in advance, from registrants, which we tried to take into consideration when creating this presentation’s content. If we have extra time at the end, we’ll take additional live questions from the audience. If you would like a more comprehensive answer to a particular question, or that speaks more directly to your individual situation, please contact us and we’ll be happy to dialogue with you.
• #3: We received a number of excellent questions, in advance, from registrants, which we tried to take into consideration when creating this presentation’s content. If we have extra time at the end, we’ll take additional live questions from the audience. If you would like a more comprehensive answer to a particular question, or that speaks more directly to your individual situation, please contact us and we’ll be happy to dialogue with you.
• #4: September 18 from 3-4pm Matt Eshleman will present Nonprofit Cybersecurity Readiness.    He’ll be covering the basics a security plan should include, and giving updates and a synthesis of our recent security webinars on understanding risks, considering cyber insurance, security incidence response best practices, and creating a multi-layered security plan.
• #5: Before we get started on the webinar, here are a few housekeeping notes….
• #6: Now, a little bit about Community IT and Build Consulting. We both work exclusively with nonprofit organizations to help them make information technology and information system decisions that support their mission. We have a collaborative approach, empowering our clients to make informed choices for their organizations.
• #7: Community IT is focused on providing outsourced network management and technical support services. Build Consulting leads in the social good sector by providing three types of services. We serve as part-time or in interim Chief Information Officers for nonprofits. We perform business process, technology, and data projects – ranging from strategic assessments and tech roadmaps to system selections and implementations. With Build Teams, we provide outsourced data managers with deep Development operations experience and nonprofit CRM expertise.
• #8: My name is Peter Mirus, and I’m your presenter for this webinar.
• #9: 20 years serving all manner of nonprofit organizations, ranging in size from small/local to enterprise/global, and across a wide variety of industry categories and mission orientations. Over the past 7 year, I’ve worked exclusively with nonprofit organizations. I’ve worked with over 100 clients in both the nonprofit, government, and for-profit spaces. I have three primary areas of expertise: marketing, constituent relationship management, and information strategy.
• #11: Build’s analysis of industry statistics, combined with our observations of hundreds of organizations in the nonprofit sector, indicates the success rate for nonprofit technology projects is under 50%. Summaries of the relevant studies and their findings are available in one article on our website.
• #12: Build Consulting’s experience is that most nonprofit technology projects fail because of other factors than technology. What do we mean by that? Simply that in today’s market, nonprofits have access to a broad range of quality technology solutions. There’s a good (or at the least, good enough) solution for the vast majority of needs. The challenge is often not the technology, but the fact that organizations do not first identify and make the organizational changes necessary to successfully select and implement new technology—or make significant improvements to the existing tech.
• #14: No, the challenges are largely cultural, orienting around leadership and governance, operational capacity, business process, and data modeling—and then technology. That’s why Build Consulting formulated its Information Strategy Framework™  to help clients explore these considerations. (See also our whitepaper: Build An Information Strategy for Your Organization.) Yes, there are technological problems to be addressed, but as one study reported, “48.5% of executives said the problem was related to the people in the [organization], while 32% blamed processes, and 19.1% pointed the finger on technology.”
• #15: When good leadership is engaged and setting the tone for an initiative, it typically goes much more smoothly. Even seemingly small information management initiatives benefit when leadership participates. Example: over 18 months of working on a major information management initiative, progress and success related directly to leadership’s commitment to participating and making key decisions at critical junctures.
• #16: Get the right people on the bus. Be sure to have good project planning and management, particularly time management. Be sure to communicate effectively with all of the audiences that need to be involved in the process: RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed). Case story: national nonprofit made sure to have the right people involved, sound project organization, and thorough communications – resulting in a successful multi-year technology roadmap.
• #17: Designing effective processes means more than just coming up with the best way to do something. It means developing sufficient documentation of the processes, and above all, executing the processes consistently. It is one thing to agree of a standard process while “in the conference room” – another to actually put it into practice at your desk. Case story: national volunteer organizations defined its case management processes in such a way to make a clear information management roadmap and organizational change initiative truly effective.
• #18: Data must be consistently collected, well-organized, properly maintained, and USED! Organizations must do all of these things well in order to have an effective information management environment. Case example: Hunger-focused organization improved its data management culture and practices to provide superior insights
• #19: Technology can be viewed as the simple answer to address problems with leadership, operations, processes, and data. For the most part, technology is supportive of how organizations behave. New technology will (for the most part) make up what is lacking n the other areas. Success story: USAID-funded economic development organization chose technology that was truly reflective of their business needs and leveraged it effectively to create new opportunities.
• #20: The last two keys are largely dependent on the first three. If you don’t have good leadership, operations, and processes, success in data and technology management will be hampered.
• #21: I’m going to briefly talk about nine different keys to success: two regarding leadership, then six related to operations, and concluding with an extremely critical key to success that encompasses process, data, and technology. Following that, we should have plenty of time for questions!
• #22: Executive sponsors should provide visible participation and regular communication. Assist with the prioritization of resources towards the effort, providing guidance and support, and ensuring accountability. Particularly for major projects that require extensive reallocation of staff time to complete successfully, actively engaged executive sponsors may by itself be the difference between being successful with the project, and not. We frequently see nonprofit organizations start with strong executive interaction in the project, but that attention wanes over time. There is a strong correlation between losing executive focus on the project and project performance setbacks. If you’d like to read more on executives can best support technology projects, see the extensive post in our blog written by one of our partners David Deal, a lead strategist at Build, as well as an experienced CEO, nonprofit CIO, and nonprofit board member. This post could be an effective tool for getting the right buy-in and engagement from senior execs, who are more likely to absorb this message from someone that has been at their level within an organization then they are to absorb the same message from a director, manager, or staff member at a lower organizational level.
• #23: - Should be done as a collective effort, including all necessary stakeholders Agree what purposeful actions during implementation will ensure benefits are realized and sustained once the project ends. Develop clear structures and models for performance measurement An example of a business benefit would be to achieve a 10% increase in sustaining members. Technology can help support this, particularly if it predicts which donors will become sustainers and helps automate the outreach campaign process. But technology alone will not address the issue. Purposeful actions during the implementation might include effective training of staff on how to use the features, and documenting new business processes to make sure they can be sustainably performed over time, including surviving potential employee turnover.
• #24: Experience is key: choose someone to lead the project that has already successfully performed a similar project in a similar situation (organization/environment). Empowerment is critical: it is very difficult being an unempowered project director or manager, who stakeholders can feel free to ignore of disregard. One of the primary challenges of successful time management at nonprofit orgs is that employee time is often not budgeted or tracked for other projects, resulting in the behavior that all staff time is considered infinitely flexible. As a consequence of this, staff are often given new responsibilities associated with the technology project, and managers do not take anything off their staff’s plates so they have the time available to commit to the effort. This results in many projects underperforming or failing outright, as well as morale problems and increased turnover during lengthy projects.
• #25: - Technology change always requires some sort of behavioral change. The practice of change management helps define the change that is coming, assesses its impact on the various roles within the organization, and help prepare those roles for the impact. Build Consulting has an change impact analysis “how to” tool and template in the Resources section of our website. Effective change management, incorporates leadership alignment, communications, training, and support. I’m currently working on a Salesforce Community-based client case management system that is being rolled to 10,000 volunteer mentors across over 300 chapters nationwide. In that scenario, leadership alignment includes not only the leadership at the national office, but also the regional vice presidents, district directors, and chapter leadership. Making sure those in leadership, at every level, are aligned to the business goals and performance metrics for the new system is critical. Communicating the phased timing of the roll-out as well as value propositions for the new system across the entire volunteership is critical. Training all expected users in the new system is of course highly important, as is planning for and delivering help desk support to all of the users. These things—leadership alignment, communications, training, and support--need to be taken into consideration for all technology projects from the early stages regardless of project size, but of course the level of change management capacity needs to be scaled to the size of the effort and will be at its greatest scale for the largest and most complex projects.
• #26: Risk assessments are particularly necessary for large or complex projects. A good risk assessment assesses all of the potential challenges or “risks” for a project, including each one’s source, probability of occurring, and potential impact on project cost, schedule, or performance. It also introduces a mitigation or response plan for each risk. A risk assessment is not a “one and done proposition” – it must be revisited and updated to track the status of existing risks and to add new risks as they enter the picture. One example of a typical risk is lack of stakeholder availability to participate based on conflicting priorities or events. Depending on the degree, this risk could have a high impact on project cost, schedule, and performance. A good example of how to mitigate such a risk would be to take steps to make sure team members are freed from responsibilities that conflict with progress on the project.
• #27: Studies show that organizations that take an open and collaborative approach, focused in incremental design and implementation processes, show greater potential for success. This is most commonly referred to as an “Agile” process. This style helps to keep all of the key stakeholders engaged throughout all the many critical decision and review/approval processes throughout a technology project, from the start of requirements discovery all the way through post-implementation phases. It also helps break down project complexities into bite-sized chunks. One warning is appropriate here: it is important that when an vendor is selected to help implement a software system—and that vendor uses an Agile approach—that the vendor has the ability to be flexible when working with an organization that has never (or never successfully) been through a true Agile process. Introducing an Agile approach to an organization unused to working in that style can be a major culture clash that can cause projects to get bogged down or collapse entirely. For Agile projects, for example, it is very important that stakeholders are frequently available to participate in design reviews and user testing—sometimes on a weekly basis. This also means committing the necessary time to make business decisions within accelerated timeframes, compared to what the organization is accustomed to. So applying Agile principles in a way that will truly work for each organization is very important.
• #28: Successful projects most frequently create a digital project collaboration environment that manages and socializes critical information related to the project. We prefer Teamwork Projects to tools like Basecamp, Asana, or MS Project. But the key is to have a functional space that is universally adopted by all the key project participants, and in which folks can be on the same page in regards to milestones, tasks, agendas and notes, files, risks, links, and critical conversations – any information the project requires to be successful. The best way to make sure a tool like this remains in active use—with up-to-date information--throughout the entire project is to use the information in the system as a live point of reference within team meetings, and to drive performance reporting to stakeholders.
• #29: Technology projects, particularly large and complex projects, often require team members inside the organization to step into roles for which they are not fully equipped. The most successful projects take this into consideration and take steps to make sure the team members are provided with the professional skills development they require to be successful in those roles. Special emphasis should be given to planning, communication, teamwork, time management, and change/adaptation skills. For one major project in which I am currently engaged, I have weekly professional development meetings with the Acting VP of Technology and the project coordinator, and ad hoc meetings towards the same purpose with other team members. The VP of Marketing and Strategy, who is the executive sponsor for the project, holds regular professional development meetings with other key project stakeholders. In this way, we collaborate to ensure that all team members have their heads-up when it comes to broadening their individual visions and equipping themselves with the perspective and skills they need to thrive in their project roles.
• #30: Both business and technical requirements. Business requirement example: Ability to transfer a case record from one counselor to another within the same agency Technical requirement example: Full data encryption, both in transit and at rest, for all counselor, client, and case data Business and technical requirements should be carefully documented and prioritized. If the organization has a poor understanding of its current business processes and data, or processes are performed inconsistently, or data quality has been poorly managed, thorough business requirements can be very difficult to develop. Poor business requirements are one of the leading contributors to projects running over budget and over schedule, and are a leading cause of the wrong system being selected and implemented. One of the reasons Build Consulting prefers to get involved with client technology projects during the early assessment and roadmap phase is because when we first get involved at the implementation phase, it often becomes apparent that the organization will need to back up and do requirements definition in a more deep or thorough manner before they can have a successful implementation. And when a vendor is engaged and the implementation is already moving, it can be very difficult and costly for the organization to push the pause button. Software vendors frequently tell Build that our clients are better prepared to have successful software selections and implementations than any of their other nonprofit customers. It is common for us to hear feedback like “I’ve been working in this space for 15 years, and this is the best RFP we’ve ever received.” This is because our clients have already anticipated, wrestled with, and made important requirements decisions ahead of going into the selection and implementation efforts. This results in selecting software that matches the needs of the organization, and a much better mutual understanding between the nonprofit and the vendor about what it will take to successfully complete the projects – including a much more accurate projection of total cost.
• #31: The last two keys are largely dependent on the first three. If you don’t have good leadership, operations, and processes, success in data and technology management will be hampered.