 Shadow of Charity sector talks, Adam Fisher. Adam is not-for-profit lead at the CIO partnership. Adam has over 30 years experience managing... You gave us this so I'm going to read it out! ...managing multi million pound businesses including within telecoms, presonal services, utilities, Government not-for-profit and financial services. Adam will be talking about the ways in which the third sector organisations are having to adjust to deal with the changing digital environment. Threator opportunities, charities and IT both face tremendous change. Over to Adam. Thanks for the introduction. The most true thing I've heard today is how hard it is to fit a presentation like this into 20 minutes. And I've really struggled to do that to be honest with you. So I'm going to cut out any further introduction to me or the CIO partnership. If you're interested in the latter, there's a website I'd refer you to. You might find it interesting. I certainly hope you do. But what I want to talk about today is going to be very mile-wide inch deep, if not millimetre deep, on a number of topics. And the first thing I wanted to do is to look at some of the changes, some of the winds of change that are blowing at everybody in the IT space, I would suggest, and practically everybody in the charity space as well, as well as practically everybody in the private sector and public sector, for that matter. And I've kind of grouped these up into a number of windstorms, if you like. The first one is just simply resulting from the economic meltdown we've seen for the last six or seven years. Lots of uncertainty, lots of ambiguity, lots of complexity, lots of confusion. What am I supposed to do next? How do I keep up with my competitors? How do I retain my customers? How do I get more donations? What on earth am I going to do about my pension funds? All that stuff means IT's involvement, to some extent, is A, confusing, but B is essential and it's essential that it be right. And it's a serious challenge. Then you look at some of the things coming out of the technology space and I don't think I'd have to suggest to anyone here today, there's lots of change happening there and it's accelerating. There are a couple of statistics that always impress me. We already had a mention about, I think it was, zettabytes, which I must admit is a new one on me. But one of the interesting things about data that I found in a research paper somewhere was there's an estimate that in the history of the world from the first recorded data, which must be several thousand years ago, till 2003, the total amount of data in the world was 30 petabytes. And what we put onto various media today, daily, is 15 petabytes. So every two days we're actually putting as much into the world of data as existed in the whole history of the world until recently, which I find quite threatening and exciting at the same time. Another statistic that I find fascinating is the population of the world. Currently the human population I'm talking about is 7.2 billion. The population of internet connected devices is 10 billion. That's 1.4 for every man, woman and child on the planet. But the estimate is that by 2020 that's going to be 6 to 1. So somebody must be doing something with all this stuff. What is it? It's going to be increasingly difficult to keep control of it. BYOD, I don't think I need to mention. Everybody here I'm sure is aware of what that's all about. Population of users, donors, trustees, volunteers in the charity space is becoming more and more mobile, as is everybody else. It's becoming essential to keep people in sync with data, with systems and so on from anywhere, anytime. A third point, increasing scrutiny, compliance. Hwan gave us a very good insight into some of the things that are happening in the data space, for example, at the moment. And the pace of that is accelerating as well as indeed does the volume of data. But the FSA's regulations, I would suggest the Charity Commission insistence in respect of charities on good reporting on a regular basis. The same goes for every other organisation. Lots and lots of other compliance issues, again comes back to IT in many cases. And finally one that I think needs more emphasis than it often gets, which is the demographic changes that we're looking at. So I myself freely admit to being an early member of the baby boom generation, and you can work out what that means, I'm really ancient, which is currently either generation V or W, depending on your point of view. Generation X, which is 35 to 45, is about 20% of the UK population at the moment. Generation Y, which is your 20 to 35 years old, is expected to be 75% of the UK workforce by 2025. And these are people who know nothing but a digital world. And they will know anything but a digital world and have massive expectations of what that digital world is going to deliver to them, how they're going to use it and how they're going to interact with it. And this affects charities as much as it does anybody else. To draw a line through all of this that takes you somewhere useful, as an IT practitioner, is not easy, that makes sure you stay relevant and valuable to your organisation. And I thought I'd just introduce here the IT leader who's going to take us through the process, I hope, through the story of how do you tread this line through all of these changes and the winds of change blowing at you. But also I just want to take a quick look at some of the things that are particular to charities that also add complexity to the equation. Because they have some special characteristics, first of all I think it's very difficult to determine what a good charity is. What is a good charity? Charities are motivated by their particular philanthropic vision aspiration and they vary enormously. In most cases I would suggest it's very difficult to measure this any way other than subjectively. Trying to look at one charity against another in terms of their cost base, for example, is usually fairly useless. It doesn't tell you very much about the charity at all. It doesn't tell you whether it's good, bad or indifferent. It just tells you they're spending more money. It might be a good thing that they're doing that. It's very hard to use that as a metric and it's also very hard to use typical metrics that you would use in the private sector, for example, top line, bottom line growth or anything else. Just an illustration of this for example is some of the recipients of charities in the UK somebody recently did a study and worked out that actually people with mental health problems currently receive 714 pounds a year from charities one way or another. People in prisons receive about 1,300 pounds a year. Donkeys receive just over 2,000 pounds a year per donkey, which I find fascinating statistic. It just gives no reflection on charities. It's just totally different motivations, aspirations and all the rest of it. You can't compare them. Makes it difficult to come up with any useful metrics. And if you look at some fundamental characteristics versus the private sector, and this is very black and white and not all private sector organisations are perfect, as I'm sure we all know, not all charities are imperfect either, but generally speaking, in the private sector you can measure your goals quite easily, whether they be top line, bottom line goals, growth goals, whatever it might be, straightforward metrics, usually something to do with money, value equals money, quite easy to measure, quite easy to measure percentage growth and all those sorts of things. The charity on the other hand you've got many varied aspirations, subjective measures, very difficult to actually track where you're going, in many cases. All you can do is think laterally about things that you'd like to do better and things that you'd like to do that you're not doing at the moment in the ambit of the philanthropic vision that you have, which again is going to vary from charity to charity. And also if you look at the mix, your stakeholder mix in a charity is quite a lot more complicated than the average private sector or even public sector organisation I would suggest. So you've got donors, you have to consider, that's where your money comes from in most cases, you've got volunteers, you've got employees, you've got trustees and you've got beneficiaries who may or may not be human at the end of the chain. You have to think about all of those people and there is a great need to involve all of those stakeholders in the decision making process and it can make that decision making process really quite complicated and lengthy. And if you think about that in the context of all these winds of change that are actually pushing everybody to make decisions faster and faster and be fleeter of foot and more agile and so on, it adds to the complexity. I'm trying not to paint too negative a picture here but I'm just giving you an idea of the sorts of things that the average IT function, retained IT function inside a charity, is facing today and my experience is most people are really doing a terrific job of trying to deal with this going forward. But it's not simple. So the next thing I wanted to look at is where typically has IT been? Let's take the picture of a typical retained IT function in an organisation somewhere, whereas it's been since about 2000, for about the last 15 years. Well, it's had an ambit that's covered what I call a back-end, which is your tin. I don't know if you're familiar with it with the word stroking tin but lots of people came from the background of stroking tin and they loved to go into the data centre in the morning and stroke it and make sure the lights are flashing and then go away. I just call that the back-end, if you like. And then there's a front-end, which is how you connect up with your users, provisioning the users, making sure the devices are standard and secure and log properly and all the rest of it. And then in the middle, you've got what I call the core. You've got IT strategy, you've got architecture, you've got relationship management, you've certainly got third-party suppliers to deal with. Data, which we've talked about in several of the sessions today, which is vitally important and the management of that and the stewardship of that, and then you've got projects undoubtedly going forward. But the perception of IT, certainly in charities and certainly in most of the private sector organisations I've been in over the period 2000 till 2010, has been it's a backroom, it's a back-office function, it's a cost item, it's there to be reactive. So if I ask them to do something, I expect it to be done and I expect them to come back to me and say I can do it this quickly and to this amount of money, but I also expect them to take much longer than I would like and be much more expensive than I would like. And that's how it's looked at. It's not looked as being proactive, strategic, influential in the true sense. As a result, the focus has always been on the IT function on the bottom line. Efficiency, standardisation. Let's keep the cost down. Let's keep the cost down. The culture that supports that has to be by necessity, reactive, risk averse, because the last thing as an IT leader that you want to happen is the lights go off in the middle of the day. So you're risk averse, you don't want to do things that are likely to jeopardise that. You don't really want to be terribly innovative and natural thinking and all the rest of it. And you need to be very controlling. I don't mean that as a personality trait. I mean just in your working life you need to be able to control the estate. If your mission is to keep the lights on, deliver service and deliver to the demand that's coming your way. And your access to the executive level is likely to be limited, it's likely to be very unstrategic, and you're unlikely to be influencing the organisation strategy going forward. And this is borne out by what you see when you look at budgets typically, what's a budget spent on. I got a statistic here from a 2011 report on charity IT budgets. And the fact is that 75% of the budget is spent on what I call the BAU monster, that is keeping the lights on. 25% gets spent on everything else. It speaks for itself, doesn't it? So where should this go? If you look at all these winds of change, if you listen to the speakers that we've had so far talking about, this whole thing is changing and the demographic changes that I think are actually really fundamental to all of this, what are you going to do to make sure that you stay relevant and valuable going forward? Well, if we look at that picture of this three-part back-end call front-end, back-end, it's disappearing. Going to the cloud, going to service providers. I think it was mentioned software as a service infrastructure platform, all that stuff, outsourcing shared services. You name it. It's rapidly going away from your ambit. Front-end, going the same way. Mobile devices, self-service. I want an app tomorrow and I only need it for six months and whatever, but I expect it to be as quick as me getting on my mobile phone and downloading an app from my massive stack of applications from Apple or wherever it might be. And I want my applications to be always on. I expect 24x7. This is the way the world is going. So your front-end is rapidly disappearing. That leaves you with a call. Same thing, strategy, architecture, management of relationships, suppliers, data. All of these things actually become more important because otherwise, if you ignore these, there is nothing left of relevance to the organisation you're servicing. So you need your focus to move to a better balance of top line and bottom line. So instead of just worrying about costs, you need to think about how do I increase revenues if you're private sector? How do I increase water micorn in my top line? Value to beneficiaries. Even if they're donkeys. How do I increase the value to those beneficiaries? How do I, as an IT leader, make that happen? How do I influence that? How do I contribute to that? That's much more interesting than just keeping the costs down. And of course you need to be aligned, heavily aligned and even influence the overall mission and vision of the charity. The culture that supports this needs to move from where it was to agility. And the key word that I have here is partnering. This is absolutely essential. Think about the turf wars that you see in the average organisation between retained IT and the marketing people and the fundraising people in terms of charities and so on. Who owns the data? What does stewardship mean? How dare you have a digital team doing stuff? I'm the IT guy and I expect to be able to decide what content management system you have and all the rest of it. This is a thing of the past. You have to be able to turn those turf wars into a completely different culture that says we, the IT function, will partner with the organisation to add value and keep our function relevant because if not, then all the tools are out there today for people to do whatever they want themselves. And dare I say, in many charities, that was the scene that people in a sort of properly formed IT function came into probably 15, 20, 25 years ago where everything was completely heterogeneous and all over the place for the same reasons. We don't want to go through that cycle again. So you need to change the culture to be more partnering. Think about a day when there's no turf wars from the morning to the evening. Wouldn't that be wonderful? And shared risk is another function of that. In other words, if you take risk, you're taking risk as a total organisation and in every part of the organisation you're working with to take that risk, whether it be a new investment in a new technology or a new project that you hadn't thought of before to support a new service that you might want to deliver to your beneficiaries, you're sharing that risk with everybody else involved. It's not just an IT risk, it's going to naturally become less risk averse and ideally the perception of the IT function goes from the back room to a place at the top table influencing the organisation, influencing its strategy, taking it forward, remaining relevant, remaining valuable and typically your budget is then split 50-50 between keeping the lights on and strategic initiatives. And what should charity IT do to make this real? First of all, develop a deep knowledge and understanding of the sector. That is the charity sector, but also the technology sector. You have to understand what's out there. You have to understand what's coming in the next couple of years. That's not an easy thing to do. You have to also understand what's already been done in the sector. What are all the communities of shared this, that and the other that take place not only in the IT space but in other parts of the charity sector. I think we've talked a lot about data today so I'm not going to go into any detail, but I see this as absolutely key. I personally feel there are six stages to data and I start with something called stuff. It actually hasn't got to be data yet. It goes through stuff and if you're lucky it becomes data. If you're even lucky it becomes information. If you're really good at what you're doing, it becomes intelligence. My goodness me, if somebody actually uses that intelligence it might even become value. Finally, at the end of the chain, is wisdom. There's kind of a lot of stages in between. An IT guy who knows what he's doing in terms of data analysis and all the rest of it and we've talked about that at length I think enough today can add a huge amount of value to that journey. You need obviously to align the IT strategy with the philanthropic mission. I've mentioned that already. Then the short term, evolved governance. Interestingly, this overlaps with a previous speaker, data governance particularly, to deliver a single source of information. Would it be nice to have a one version of the truth? Your donors are asked for a piece of information. Your volunteers, your employees, your beneficiaries, and they will get the same answer. That would be remarkable. Partner, partner, partner with marketing, fundraising, whatever to exploit the digital space, whatever it might be. Get into smart procurement, learn about this. There may be procurement people already in your charity. That's fine. But work with them so that actually when you do your deals with your hosting providers and your cloud providers and everything else, they are the best possible. That is a real value add and it keeps you relevant in the organization. And make sure that you've got the governance, the services, the support and everything in place to keep that mobile stakeholder base happy because that is going to become more and more critical time going forward in the medium term. Fix governance to better suit partnering across the board and the sharing of technology, slim down the IT team inevitably if you lose the back end and part of the front end, you have to be smaller. But the people that you've got need to be upskilled into change management, cultural change, good quality analysis, especially data analysis and consultancy with the organization and transform data into wisdom and value, integrate service from multiple partners, incredibly valuable, keep it seamless. You've suddenly got lots of cloud deliverers. You don't necessarily need all of your people to know who they are or whatever. The more invisible they are, the more seamless the service, the better. And in the long term, if you're successful with those short and medium term activities, you will actually get a place at the top table where you'll be able to influence things. So in conclusion, I hope I've shown you this and fairly strong winds of change blowing at all of us at the moment. And charities are not exempt from any of these. In fact, there are additional threats, but a great opportunity exists if you change the focus of IT, change the culture surrounding it. And if you're successful in that, everybody wins. You trust these, your employees, your donors, your volunteers, and ideally your beneficiaries, even if they're not people. Thank you.