Yeah, but computer networks don't send you monthly bills like them telephone companies do.
Nobody complains much about the overhead that the accountant/bookeeper or the accounting service adds to the administrative costs of an organization. Why is that? Are information technology services any less essential than accounting services? Really?
As an experiment, try doing your 2006 personal income tax returns by hand. Then do them again using a tax preparation software application. See if agree that the $30-$50 tax deductable cost of the software is worth the investment. It's pretty much the same with any type of good organizational information technology.
Everybody in organization management and services provision should know how to write a business plan, do a business process analysis, do a cost/benefit analysis, do a return on investment analysis, and calculate a total cost of operation, and develop performance metrics, whether directly involved in information technology management or not. Most grant providers ask for most of that stuff now anyway, whether they use the same labels or not.
Most everybody nowdays is already using a very sophisticated information technology system. It's called a "wireless phone," or "cell phone." You no longer have to sit at your desk to make and receive telephone calls. Regardless of where you are, just flip it open and start calling. (Unless you have Cingular, of course.) You no longer have to carry around a paper address book. The little sucker has one built in. Nobody complains about how technical it is, or how much it costs, or asks, "Why in the world do we need wireless phones when we have perfectly good phones on our desks?" When it rings, you just push the little button and talk. When you need to make a call, you just look up the person in the little sucker's address book and push the button and talk. Nobody complains about how complex and technical the system is. They just chuckle when the guy in the commercial asks, "Can you hear me now?" Now, why is managing volunteers on a compu
ter any harder than that.
If I told some folks I was going to provide them with an information-technology device that would let them communicate more effectively and efficiently, and was location-independent I would get all kinds of protests about costs, and complexity, and inabilitys to understand complex technology. But if I tell them I'm going to give them a cell phone for business use, they'll start asking me what features it has. Go figure.
If I tell a board of directors that I'm going to buy the organization with a $600 dollar computer, a Pay Pal account, and a Web site that costs $30 a month, and will bring in an estimated additional $10,000 a year in hard yankee money donations, I'm likely to get all sorts of questions about why the computer is needed, complaints about increasing admin costs, questions about why the staff can't do the same thing with the resources they have, etc. Now why is that?
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>>;Theron mentions a key problem. Once people install telephones, they rarely need upgrades and repairs, certainly not an additional staff salary. Computers, to be as useful as we know they can be, often require ongoing salary expense. In large non-profits, an analysis of the the cost benefits might help. In small non-profits where everyone tends to work many unpaid hours and the staff number is 1-7, there has to be a different kind of answer.>;>
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