Non-Profit Tech Blog

So last night, I attended the N-TEN Summer Smoke-Out Tour. Katrin Verclas, the new N-TEN ED, and Bill Lester, who sits on N-TEN’s board, were there fielding sheets of paper upon which were printed a comic-book style dialogue bubble where we were to write in what we wanted to say about N-TEN. There’s a pic of me somewhere in Katrin’s camera with me holding my little critique of N-TEN. To their credit, they were asking for solicited criticism of N-TEN and I admire that simply because I know that that kind of criticism can easily spiral out of control…

However, as usual at N-TEN events, there were vendors sniffing around for contacts and trying to raise their general visibility. Contrary to popular perception, I’m not vendor-averse. You need only look at the posting before this one to see that I recommend that smaller non-profits reach out to vendors in order to avoid staffing up for their IT infrastructure. The vendor I met was Sinu, a new start-up aimed at providing IT for small nonprofits and businesses and my brief talk with John Christie from Sinu seemed to indicate that they seemed to have the same philosophy (don’t let smaller nonprofits touch the computers!) and they will also take care of your local file server. “Outsource” is not a bad word for nonprofits under 20.

My only problem with N-TEN is the vendor to non-profit IT worker ratio at the NTC. Bill made it fairly clear that the NTC is primarily a product of vendor contributions to N-TEN. Without the vendors, there’s no money, and without the money, no NTC. That makes sense. The vendors show up in a kind of ecological balance to the IT nerds who show up. According to this paper by Exponent Partners, us nonprofit IT Directors spend $43 billion on IT a year. However, there are less and less reasons for your average IT director to attend the NTC if the conference experience is similar to going on the Web and browsing for vendors. I sometimes thought of the gigantic vendor hall at the NTC as a kind of meatspace version of some del.icio.us tag entitled “nonprofit vendor”. N-TEN’s breakout sessions are rife with vendors and consultants tacitly pitching their wares (you teach what you know and what you know is mostly what you sell). There’s not enough interaction between IT directors that really would lend a bit of a “you can’t get this anywhere else” feel.

I recommend that the N-TEN NTC do things that stray from the norm of yet another breakout session on social networking or eCRM:

• A breakout session entitled “For IT Directors Only (your business cards will be checked): B***h and moan about your vendor and then come up with strategies so that it will never happen again”
• A breakout session called “OMG! OMG! OMG! This is the best EVAR!!!” — Tout your vendor and/or the new tech you just discovered
• A breakout session called “Slick Deals: A Leasing Tutorial for the Financially Challenged IT Director” — the difference between FMV, $1 buyout and other kinds of leases
• A breakout session called “How to Make Yourself Redundant: A Lesson in IT Ethics” — Why your #1 ethical goal as an IT Director should be to make yourself as replaceable as possible and what sort of documentation you can write to do this.
• A real hot breakfast for those of us who can actually wake up for it during each day of the NTC; I’m not a Danish and coffee kind of guy…
• And of course, “Confessions of an IT Director: How you too can confess your IT sins on the Web” — Why you should post about your day to day efforts to be the best IT Director you can be…

Anyway, I hope Katrin takes some of these breakout sessions to heart because I know I’d definitely show up to breakout sessions like this. I know I’m being facetious about a few of those options but certainly some kind of acknowledgement of the difficulties of an IT Director’s job in the nonprofit sector would be certainly appreciated.