There's just one more week until the launch of Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission, a new book produced by NTEN and published by Jossey-Bass/Wiley. The book's Table of Contents is a veritable Who's Who of the nonprofit tech world, including an excellent chapter by Kevin and Willow at TechSoup Global.

Steve Heye, whose blog has been discussed here before, begins the book with a chapter on IT alignment. Over the past few weeks, Steve has been offering some thoughts on tech alignment, based on his own experience in the YMCA (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5).

I've really been enjoying reading these. As Steve points out himself, the fundamentals of IT strategy don't cause as much buzz in the nonprofit blogosphere as the latest gadget or social media tool, but they're at the heart of everything we do. Whether your nonprofit's IT department is a fraction of one person's work week or thirty full-time employees, IT should be an integral part of project planning, not a quick bandage for when something breaks.

If you're really short on time, just skip to last Monday's entry. Here, Steve offers some great charts and models for IT alignment. He lays out five levels of IT integration ranging from Chaos ("No technology budget or plan") to Value ("Technology fund integrated with overall strategic budget and plan"). He also nails a key error people sometimes make when talking about tech planning:

...[YMCA leadership] asked the CEOs across the YMCAs what was most important to them. And of course, the CEOs didn't rate technology as most important, probably because it isn't. Technology isn't the priority, but every single thing that the CEOs said was important would require technology to give it the biggest benefit.

Another resource for IT-planning issues is TechSoup's own Tech Beginner's Guide. Steve's team even created a special YMCA-specific version (305 KB PDF). We're working on rewriting the Guide, so if there are topics you'd like to see us cover, let us know!

Photo: Thomas Hawk  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

CompassPoint's Silicon Valley office is offering a workshop on selecting and implementing database software on December 14 from 9:30 to 3:30 p.m. in Milpitas, California.

If you've ever seen the Saturday Night Live skit Nick Burns: Your Company Computer Guy ("He'll fix your computer, then he's going to make fun of you"), you know that the snarky techie featured in the series can be a pretty accurate representation of some of the IT personnel out there.