Your Digital Infrastructure Is Your Strategic Plan

“BUILD LONGER TABLES, NOT HIGHER WALLS…”

I just didn’t see it coming. I didn’t see that attending the Amazon Web Services IMAGINE nonprofit conference would be meaningful in so many different ways.

First, “Build longer tables, not higher walls.” Many people have said that, but José Andrés, CEO of World Central Kitchen, said it in a video from a war zone. He was unexpectedly busy feeding refugees, so he couldn’t be at the conference in person. Talk about gravitas.

Second, my brain broke when I realized this was also what AWS was saying to us at the conference. They were saying, “We can help build a data table where every department can sit and partake of the organizational asset that is data.” Build longer tables, not higher walls.

STRATEGY PLANNING SCREW-UPS

I have been doing this for 32 years, helping social good entities move closer to their missions’ goals. I have been complicit in developing what I thought were really good plans to move toward better outcomes, but I was not paying enough attention to the bones.

I did not internalize to the degree that I should have that digital infrastructure and data silos = organizational silos. But, of course, that is true. How could it not be true? It was staring me in the face the whole time.

I have always known that any successful strategy — for any initiative — is embedded in the organization by the supporting software being used.

I have helped develop strategic plans many times over. In every case, we’d create the strategic blueprint, then hope the IT team would follow suit. But that path ignored some big stuff:

• Big ideas have to come from the Board and CEO

• Changing your digital infrastructure to match your strategic plan is a huge lift. It’s not cheap. It’s not easy. And it’s not an idea that most IT Chiefs (whatever you might call them) can sell.

Part of the problem is that IT speaks and works in a specialized sphere of expertise, one that’s not shared by those developing strategies. Technology and digital infrastructure for the organization at large is assumed to follow the strategy, but then it rarely does. IT Chiefs have to make tradeoff decisions driven by crises and influences typically different from what drove the strategic plan.

HABIT CHANGES

In retrospect, this seems obvious, but it isn’t. The budget and drivers for a digital transformation are disconnected in almost every case from the budget and drivers for organizational transformation. It’s like deciding to lose weight but continuing to buy all the same foods. If there is still ice cream in the freezer, the losing weight part is much less likely to happen.

The digital infrastructure robustly reinforces our cultural silos with our everyday logins, keystrokes, data handling, data storage, and data protection. The digital infrastructure creates and reinforces conflict between, for example, multiple departments with email campaign capability that work off different platforms. The digital infrastructure maintains data silos because it is the path of least resistance. It takes much more effort to create data governance and collaboration. It’s easier to just keep it separate. Our HR performance metrics do not encourage (and in fact, discourage) the sharing of data. If data sharing is both hard and counterproductive to my next job promotion, will I do it? No.

HUMANS…SHEESH…

Our most basic instincts — “protect my stuff,” “elevate my status,” “win the game” — are enabled by our digital infrastructure, so we have allowed them to perpetuate.

Third-party disjointed platforms allow us to maintain personal autonomy. Autonomy of almost any stripe is very, very personally satisfying, but in this case, it’s terribly destructive to nonprofit missions. Because we love our siloed way of living, maintaining personal control of as much stuff as possible, we find reasons not to de-silo: it’s not easy, too much money, the pain of change, not enough bandwidth for executing change, etc. These reasons sound logical, don’t they? Unfortunately, they are only logical when viewed through a first-person, “it’s all about me” lens.

If you live in a house without walls, your behaviors reflect your environment. You take care not to be too loud. You share the physical space and the stuff in it. If you live in a house with rooms, and one room is yours, you keep your room the way you want. That room is a personal reflection of you. We’ve been hiding organizational data in our rooms, under our beds.

Our digital infrastructures must move from the “many-tiny-room-ranch-house” to the “open-floor-plan-transitional.”

Erik Rogers, Strategic Partner Executive with AWS, said, “It all starts with strategy, an over-arching data strategy. No matter how big or small your strategy is, that is the beginning. What are the advantages of going to the cloud with your data? Once in the cloud, we can work with all that data in a structured manner to apply AI, predictive, etc. This is hard for nonprofits, so let’s work backward from the beautiful dream. We [AWS] have the unique opportunity of being a well-funded company, so we’ll pay for all that development.” (I don’t know exactly what “pay for the development” means…but you can bet your booties I’ll find out.)

Erik continued, “The way software is sold now is ‘Here is my product; match it to what you want to do.’ We [AWS] are the Home Depot of tech — there is nothing we can’t build with partners going through a proof-of-concept process.”

…we were on several different platforms for social fundraising.There was no data to cross-reference to help us understand constituents. That inability impacted operations.”

Kelly Russo, formerly of NAMI, was at the conference. She said, “For nonprofits, COVID put things in a different perspective. Back in the day, it was in-person (data was limited). Now, it’s all digital. We are creating a LOT of data. At previous organizations I worked for, we were on several different platforms for social fundraising. There was no data to cross-reference to help us understand constituents. That inability impacted operations.”

Most of us in social good believe the path to success is through building a robust, deeply connected, and committed community. But can we ever build our community unless we are transparent within the organization? Can we achieve inner transparency without bringing the data together from all sources? Isn’t siloed data just a reflection of the embedded strategy and culture? If we say, “we’re going to build a community,” but we don’t address the data silos from the ground up, we will not build that community. We cannot build that community.