The list of principals that Beth Baldauf put out in her "Nonprofit Best Practices" thread this week might be a good start for your readiness assessment:
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1. Systems are in place to provide timely, accurate and relevant information.
2. The organization has created and regularly updates a plan for inventorying and ensuring sufficient resources for technology.
3. The organization has established policies that govern the use of information and technology systems, including security, data storage, appropriate use, access rights, maintenance, and back-up.
4. The organization has established policies to ensure confidential information and privacy, with appropriate procedures to limit access to data.
5. Staff, board members and volunteers have the skills they need to use technology required for their work.
6. The organization has a written mandatory retention and periodic destruction policy, which includes guidelines for electronic files and voicemail.
7. Policies and practices are in place to identify and protect the organization's intellectual property rights and to ensure the rights of other organizations are not violated.
8. The organization maintains and implements plans to deal with disasters and transitions.
9. The organization seeks to ensure that any web-based information about the nonprofit is accurate.
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IT needs assessment can mean many things and I think part of why the templates tend to be so overly simplistic is that a meaningful needs assessment can't be automated, or self administered...
- you don't know what you need if you don't know what you need
- especially if you don't really know what is possible!
- needs are a function of mission and business process. So without analyzing those against current IT infrastructure, there is no way to come up with the gap analysis that really constitutes a needs assessment.
...which is where outside expertise is necessary.
An IT readiness assessment is a good idea and definitely could be self administered, since it would really just give the organization a score based on Y/N answers to the kinds of issues listed above. Keep us informed as to what you come up with.
If you'd like me to send it; I do have a mini-review form that I use as part of a 2hr interview process with organizations which gives me and them a general sense of their needs, and where their focus for IT investment and change management should be. They fill in the form, but until we sit down and do the interview that alone can't inform a meaningful IT Strategy Plan which is what a needs assessment should do.
The full needs assessment process we do with organizations requires between 10hrs-50hrs of interviews and research applied to the specifics of the organization (dependent on organization size and complexity). We've tried to template this work as far as possible, but in the end it is like tailoring a suit. Each organization is just unique.
Jenny
Southern Oregon Project Manager
netCorps
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>>I have felt the same way about that worksheet from TechSoup. I see people link to it all the time, but it is so simple and seems to miss so much as you said. I am in the midst of creating an simple self assessment that will see what your IT maturity stage is, I will share it back with TechSoup when I am done. But in the meantime, does anyone have an IT readiness assessment? What is that? Well I have seen and read that many times you need to determine if an organization is ready before embarking on large scale technology changes. So I am looking for a checklist of sorts that would list the things that need to be in place before a large technology project starts. For example, solid infrastructure, documented procedures, staff trained, culture that accepts technology, staff stress level, etc...>>
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