Lots of angst over at the Today I Cried blog — I think it’s the only other nonprofit IT director blog that I’ve seen (and I’d love to be corrected, really). Here’s a list of grievances from the still-anonymous (but male) IT director.
Why hire a marketing company with no web experience to create your website?
Why spend the money on making a new website on Kintera when the same amount of money could have been used to transition the company to a new CMS/CRM system that actually works, is supported, and delivers?
Why pick a PRI vendor without soliciting competitive bids?
Why pick a T1 vendor without soliciting competitive bids?
Why hire an IT Manager if you don’t want that person to manage the IT?
Those are pretty bad things to be complaining about. All those items are definitely within the purview of the IT Director and for that org to not actually let him do it is strange. I can see how it works though. It’s a typical scenario within nonprofits. Nonprofits would rather “freeze” out their employees rather than fire them. It usually stems from a general HR malaise within nonprofits especially within the social services arena. From what I can read between the lines, the poor guy is getting “frozen” out of decision-making in that all too passive-aggressive way that nonprofits unfortunately excel at. It’s a sad state of affairs and one that is all too prevalent in our sector. It’s not to say that this doesn’t happen in the private sector but generally speaking, an HR process should have started long ago in an attempt to deal directly with the root of discontent on the part of the ED and the IT Director. I suspect that this agency probably doesn’t have a way of dealing with this in a formal fashion.
All I can say is that today I cried, too. I’ve experienced in lesser degree many of the frustrations that he’s listed on the blog and I’ve attributed it to a kind of general nonprofit culture since this story repeats itself so often from other workers I know in other agencies. Generally speaking, nonprofit managers have little or no contact with private sector management regimens and as a result don’t take the time to collect best practices (especially HR) and actually implement those practices. And ultimately, this hurts our sector because our sector requires that we import people from other industries (such as IT) as we become more reliant on technologies and business practices that rely on scalable solutions. However, IT people (at least the good ones I know) come from more dynamic industries where cost/benefit analysis and long-term planning is a way of life when nonprofit managers are unacquainted with that way of thinking. I’m fairly optimistic this will change when we realize that we are not managing social workers, but knowledge workers in our industry. Can we start thinking of our employees as knowledge workers and not some strange variant between “line staff” and “client”? The jury is still out but I don’t think the sector has much of a choice.
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