 I'm here. Thank you all for coming. I'm Nate Parsons and I'm one of the co-founders of Parsons DKO and I am joined today by a fantastic expert joining us from the Enterprise Community Partners, David Edwards, their CIO. And I'll also be getting a little help today from my co-worker, John. So I don't know, John, if you want to take it away. Sure. It's nice to meet everyone. I'm John Harrison, Solutions Producer at Parsons DKO. We're here to really talk about three general topics today, post-pandemic technology investments, team convergence and the new hybrid reality that we find ourselves in these days, and all the change of management that that entails. So essentially we want to look at some organizations that built in resiliency and remote work capability before the pandemic, and how they fared much better during the pandemic than those that sort of scrambled to catch up, which is one of the reasons why I invited a former colleague, David, to be a part of this conversation. And we want to talk about what's next, you know, now that we've moved along the continuum from pandemic to post-pandemic or arguably post-pandemic. We'd like to take a look back at some of the strategies and tactics that IT executives, IT leaders have used, also marketing leaders, if there's other folks on the team joining, fundraising, that type of thing. Things that have been done to sort of keep mission-driven organizations afloat and at times flourishing, you know, during these challenging times that we've been through. We also want to talk about how technology has enabled that, but also look at how we adjust to this new challenge of hybrid work. We know from the data that many employees are hesitant to return to a physical office, but there's also a disconnect between what employees want and what some of the executives want. So we're seeing that a partial return to the office is likely for many. What does that partial return mean for those tools and processes that we all got comfortable using and navigating during the pandemic? And we want to also think about how this impacts the future of things like video conferencing, collaboration with internal employees, but also your internal stakeholders, your constituents, your marketing teams, your sales teams, how you manage events, how you're managing webinars. So really, this is largely a conversation about change management and how successful leaders choose to invest in certain tools and how they bring folks on board. And also how they communicate those changes and how they impact things that are near neighbor to their work and how they create catalysts for change and build resilience, which is a big, big important part of this. So that's, I want to ask Nate first, you know, give us a little bit of professional background and your area of expertise and how, what drew you to be interested in organizational change and change management. And also, what's your relationship to technology strategy and investment. And then I'll ask the same question to David. So, Nate, why don't we start with you. Great. Thanks. There's some lovely questions. So just a little bit of background about me. I started my career as a software developer, and I was a developer for 10 years to doing all sorts of various things kind of, you know, starting out doing web applications, you know, things like virtual student unions for colleges, things like that. And then eventually, moving into sort of large scale enterprise web development for clients like the United Nations or the US House of Representatives, you know, really large scale implementations things like that. And as I kind of got two, three, 10 years, I kind of wanted to switch it up a little bit. And so I switched over to the user experience side of the house because I'd always been interested in that part of things. And I did that for four or five years. And, you know, that sort of became a unique skill set having a sort of, you know, large scale enterprise engineering background mixed with sort of a user experience mindset. And one of the through lines through that, you know, career was that whenever these technology projects that I worked on were delivered, there was a variability in the use and the uptake of these systems, you know, like a brand new project be completed. And it might be a successful project and then it deployed something but did it actually change how the business worked was there like value return where you know did people change the way they worked to use the new capabilities they've been given. Sometimes the answer that was uneven or no, you know, and that led me to be really interested in this, you know, sort of theory of change, how do organizations actually evolve, not just, you know, acquire, because I think there's often a sense that if you buy technology you have the capability, we're really, you know, it's people, it's process, it's strategy, it's, you know, adoption, it's, you know, configuration and small tiny ways that remove frictional elements that make people's days better and the tool more enjoyable to use. And all that got me really interested in this idea of, you know, how do we actually empower people with technology not to sort of deliver it to them. You know, and that's part of why we, you know, have things like, you know, professional networking group on LinkedIn so that we can continue to have conversations around that in an informal way and let people kind of work on those sort of issues. But anyway, that's sort of my background and how I got into these things and how it relates now to things like, you know, strategy and budgeting is that I'm often consulting for organizations and the nonprofit and mission driven space about how they spend their money most effectively and how they can handle long term planning, you know, I think that one of the things that's challenging for all tech organizations, but especially for smaller nonprofits and folks who are using technology but don't consider themselves a technology organization is the, you know, life cycle planning of tools, you know, how do they add something to their toolkit how do they remove it how do they pick something understanding the turnover there is they're going to have as an organization. So all those sort of pieces of the puzzle need to be sorted out. And that's something that we try and help organizations do a better job with and sort of have more expertise to bring to bear on those problems. So, that's a long way to answer about how I got here but hopefully eliminating and yeah I'll direct you to John. Sure. And David would love some, you know, some, some intros from you about like what got you interested in change management was it out of necessity was, you know, and I would say, at least I started my career. I'm a network engineer by trade so I have the opposite of me. I started my life in data centers and, and, you know, working in hardware. And, you know, honestly, you know, throughout my career what I what I found is very similar to me. I was in the business of delivering technology. Right. That was the goal, right. You need a new building you need a new data center built all of those great things. Here's the capability. It is delivered. What I found and you know this is along with the way that the, you know, the industry is matured itself was, you know, I would deliver technology say a remote say a remote access technology VPN to to a group of end users. Like, I provided it to them, and then they would say, Well, we really wish it did this or, you know, how do you do this when you're in, in an airport or how do you do you know so I really started to see that it was going in this is as early as 2008 2009 that it really was going to you couldn't just drop off a technology at the customer's door and expect them to just take it right like here it is. You know, the consumer technologies were moving just as we're moving faster that we were right in corporate technology. And you know they were beginning to want similar treatments and similar support that they saw on the consumer side and that really led to, you know, a lot of the things that I that I that I do now and I'll let you, you know, let us get kind of get further into the talking about it but I spent my career starting out as a technology to to kind of transforming into the solutions provider to the, you know, almost, almost the fixer right so there's technologies and our meat we have lack of adoption and we have lack of lack of, you know, capitalizing on our investments right which is one of the worst things that you can happen is you spend a bunch of money you go through a bunch of change, and you lack adoption, and you, and you lack true true true real return on investment right so throughout my career I've moved from you know from being a network engineer to through management of various various levels, and really the ability to do the things to do change management is the name of the game. Right, to be able to do and that's the big change management, not just with with customers but with executives with, you know, with boards and also specifically with your own team, right, this is actually the other piece so I've been in, I've been in it since I was 19 years old so probably 20 something years and throughout you've seen that change in the demand for more change management from from from what was what used to be simply a utility right it was like internal lights on you have internet. You know so. Yeah, I have a I have a great story. David and I were colleagues at a big nonprofit for a couple of years, but going back way before that this is back in 2012 October of 2012 to be specific. The guy that hired David came into my office and I just started working at this nonprofit. He was literally a month before, and he was really concerned about something and I was responsible at the time for the company's internet we called it in at at the time. And I was responsible for the company's website so internal communications the external communications were really important. This is a pretty fast growing nonprofit I think you know at that time there were maybe 350 400 employees, but we were hiring fast and furiously and and acquiring other nonprofits while this was going on. And the, the then it leader sat down with me and said I'm really concerned because Superstorm Sandy is heading up the coast. And we moved all of our servers from the roof to the basement after 911. You know, that was the big thing back then was like you know we got to get the servers on premise servers down to the basement, and I just have a really bad feeling about this. We talked about how he had directory controllers like in the basement so that people could log into their computers. We talked about how only 25% of the staff had laptops at the time. They only had a few SAS applications so there was like Salesforce and maybe, maybe we were using SharePoint on a limited scale. And I think he realized this is something that's going to happen, like, often, and it did, you know, the next day, the server room was literally underwater, and, you know, we scrambled to get folks home we scrambled to get messages to them, you know, because they couldn't, they couldn't get to our internet unless they were sitting physically in the office logged into their computers you know so getting messages to them you know it's like should we put these messages on our public website for employees it was a big scramble. And I think you know this this IT leader was definitely a visionary and he hired a great guy, David of course. But David came in and you know he came into a situation before the pandemic you know this is two years before the pandemic give or take. And I just remember, we had gotten to the point at this nonprofit where everybody was using every, every tool it was a smorgasbord of software right it was like a litany of legacy applications. You know, and I think it was, it had good intentions you know there, it was, it was, give everybody the tools that they need to do their job and they'll pick the right tool and so on. David you came on board and you know one of the first things you did is like, I think you said, there's a lot of things going on, we need to simplify this right. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the processes and strategies and tactics that you went through going from what you inherited to really getting to that point in March of 2020, when the World Health Organization said, we got a global pandemic on our hands. And immediately, the company we worked for shifted the entire workforce within a week, you know, at an end a nonprofit to distributed remote work, you know, what, what happened between that period of time between the time you started and where we landed right before the pandemic and what were some of the stories you can tell us about how you brought people along with the change that you kind of brought to the organization at that point in time. Right. Well, I'll tell you, it's a long story, but I'll try to keep it brief. So, so when I came in in this, you know, it's, it's something that I have been able to repeat, and through some failures, right, figured out how to do it. At least the one way that works for me, but you know the very first thing I did when I when I joined the organization was I actually met with like 56 business leaders. That was the very first thing. And I kind of have a very, it's a very simple process with like for changing things that in one of the very first thing is trust right. So the first thing I wanted to do was say hey I'm the new guy in town. I'm here to help, not from the government and I'm here to help but I'm here to help you. And, and try to build some relationships and just get to know who was who right in that organization. But I would say that the very first thing I did was assess the catalog of tools that we have. And although I, you know, I would say that it is, it is great to allow people to make decisions on what tool they would like to use. You cannot abdicate the responsibility that you are literally the expert, and that is what they are paying you for right. So, yes, they will pick a tool because they have to get their job done, but that is your job. Okay, so I, I like, there's kind of two things and I brought it up in the intro that you need to do right so you have to have, you have to build that trust, and that is with your business your consumers, your customers, and it's with your team and in that particular role, I was new, right I'm the new leader, I'm a new team. I'm trying to assess them. I'm trying to assess the tools, and I'm trying to assess my new customers right. So what I did is I did that I went through and I did some business interviews with with my stakeholders. I was assessing my team, and I was assessing our tools and I'm literally looking through these tools and there's so much redundancy. I go to look with my team and they're like yes we know how to run three out of the seven and we know some of this and oh that is only run by this department and they and we don't really run it. You know it's not ours, you know all of those those good things they bought that buy sells all kinds of great stuff like that right. And so what what I like to do is I do I wanted to make it simple. Right, but when you're doing that you're coming up with a solution that involves, you know, the pain points that you've heard from your customers, along with what your team can truly support along with your knowledge right. So, the first thing I did after I did the assessment was sort of mirror back to to my customers like what they've been saying, and to my team, because you need it's crazy with change management you think that you're changing the business but also your team needs to buy in that's like you can have people kind of detracting from the new strategy that you want to implement right so you got to get those guys on board guys and guys on board. First and foremost, so that they're wrong with your with with with what you want to do. So, I basically did this assessment, had a huge catalog of things, talked to the team about what they know how to do what they don't what they think about some of the problems one of those were an old Cisco system that was 12 years old, and was out of warranty, and we can barely support we had a third party third party vendors and started support, and it cost us a lot of money. So, it allowed it allowed us to to basically really narrow in on some of the real issues that people were having. They could not communicate with each other. Well, they didn't know which system that any other department may be on at any given time. Right. So we really started to hone in on, we need a unified communication strategy. Number one, but there were pieces underneath that we had to implement in order to, in order to enable it. We needed better connectivity at all of our offices, right. We needed to, you know, basically get rid of the reliance on our main office which was the Columbia data center, our Columbia headquarters. And it's servers and all that other stuff because it was truly hindering the way that people needed to be mobile, especially as our, you know, mission based nonprofit where spread across the US is people traveling all the time. They can't get to the internal resources when they go to certain places. They don't know what the Wi Fi is when you go from one office to the other, you know, all of those those blocking and tackling things also need to be need to be improved. You need to take all of that those inputs, and you now have to obviously get, get buying from the, you know, your operating committee your executive level, right. And when you come when you get when you get there, you really need to be speaking their language right so I am all I'm all about the business case writing my memo, getting my return on investment, because that's the language that they speak it right up. Look, if I do this. In fact, us moving to specifically going to zoom. Save us like 1.4 million dollars over three years, right. And you wouldn't think it would because it by nature that subscription model usually means that you're going to spend more money. And when we calculated all of the different pieces of that change, including the, the software, you know, the, the WebEx to go to meeting the Citrix, the internet circuits that we're going to be combined, the had them and renegotiated 10 years. And then together equals a savings that you're going to get the green light from the CFOs and CEOs with that. And you're taking that fact that the users are also complaining, complaining about it. And you combine the last part with that we're going to pick a solution that your team, your, your technology team can support. At that point, everybody's good, you know, it's going to go to get more rough once you start implementation. But at that point, you really listen to your stakeholders, your internal and external stakeholders, and you made your business case. So you're you're, you're, we were in a really good place, probably by the fall of 2019. We've done all of this assessment. We told it, you know, we've got our business case together. We, we both we both. And I want to take one step back the whole time while you're doing that assessment. You are responding with when when users are complaining about specific technologies and what isn't working what isn't working. You're responding with, yes, we have this unified communication plan and program, we will be resolving these issues right because that is the other piece to get people to come with right. So the whole time in john you know I'm sending out messages, there's a technology update on, you know, December 1 we will be getting rid of blue jeans. And I'm telling them what's going away and the new solution we will be moving to a zoom meeting and teams for chat blah blah blah blah blah the whole time you're, you're keeping that message and that that communication open. And you're also and there's a big, big piece. You're going to have detractors, people are going to say that they love X, right. You have to listen to them. Like you have no choice. And not only you like you don't have, you're not going to change your strategy necessarily, but you have to listen to, right. And I think that's, that's one of the things that I learned, you know, through the years is when you're just delivering software you almost tuned them out. Right, you look we got to take the meat we're going to push through, but the whole time you have to listen to it because you're trying to build that trust right. The other piece that we did along the way was we, we had an education plan also right so as we started building a program, we, we had education on two fronts, we had the internal team who's going to deploy education, you know how to run these new tools that we want to run and then we had the end user education, meaning one we said hey this thing is coming. Here's why it's coming. You know I literally had, you know webinars with the end users look this thing is coming this is why we've heard we've listened to you. We sent out surveys all of those that program was set up. And then the last pieces we also had in user involvement. So we made people stakeholders in this change like you. Finance person will be the person who advocates for our stuff. So by the time we got to basically January. So we deployed zoom meeting in the fall of by January or 2020, we had deployed zoom phone. And we, and it was, it was a dynamic shift, I will say for most because we told them we're getting rid of the big piece of green plastic that was sitting on their desk that they must have and it was, it was quite a bit of uproar. But at the same time, I, when I say you can't advocate it you have to look that you know what if you know what the right solution is that no one else did the, you know, the developer, the loan, the loan origination folks. That's not their, their job, they really need someone to deliver them the right solution for them, who has listened to. So, you know, I will say that the big change management is, is all about the, you know, it's all about trust, education and involvement. Like if you can do that, you're you in repeat, you know, recent right, you will be, you'll be in a good place as you talk you listen to them, and you responded with with the right thing and luckily I mean it was no, there was no obviously no foresight into that, you know, in two months later we would have a pandemic, but by the time we got to be by the time we got to March, we had already upgraded all the internet at every office, we had already deployed virtual phones and all the phone phones were already moved to all 1100 employees. And we had already deployed some media may have been on some media for like four months already so we had already retired the old systems. And which is which is a win for the team. It's a win for the it budget because obviously we were able to cut costs doing it. You know, the rest was history because you're rolling in and, you know, it was a very, very seamless, you know, role to remote. But honestly, the way I feel about in this, this is this is very true is that most of those things are usually invested in. Usually, it's very hard to say that you want to spend a bunch of money on phone system. You know, you cannot sell it that way. It has to be sold like I'm listening to your problems. This is a fix for your problem, not the old full system is really old. It's out of warranty. I want $2 million to replace it. That's not the, that's not the spiel right the spiel is you have pain points. They are your corporate office has gone down twice in the last two months. Here's the result. Here's a resolution and it'll save you money. Yeah, when right so that that's a long story. It's really condensed to a to a, you know, 15 minutes. I mean, you also did a, you also did a pretty fantastic job of identifying like the units of time that your team was spending on supporting like this legacy system, you know, and like those, those, those old green Cisco phones, you know, they're, you know, your systems would would work over the weekends to run patches on that system and move phones and everything. And if, if you had gone into the pandemic with those desk phones has a still sitting on the desk and use it would have been much tougher. Oh yeah, I'm sure I will I have from experience I know I've supported the remote Cisco phone at someone's house at someone's home. And then you don't want, you know, it's all right. It's all right. And I want to point it point out another thing that I think made made this successful is just the, you allowed everyone, all the staff to participate in the change like you let us pick our own headsets. You know, you offered plenty of training and adoption, like opportunities, you know, for entire departments to basically come how to learn how to make the most of this new situation, new situation and every one of those was a was a success, you know, and it also got people involved and I can pick my own headset. This is going to be fine. We had tech base right we had tech base where we're showing them the new things that were coming that were coming, you know, it, you know, honestly, it's, it's, it's outside of my personality to do that. But you have to know that if the you want to give as many opportunities as possible, you know, that for people to come to adjust to the changes coming right because there is no there is. I mean, honestly, to be extremely transparent journals and your career is tied to it right so the outcome of this is tied to give them as much opportunity as possible. You know what, and I, and I have stories of when this didn't go this well right, but you know we we did. It's a small concession to give someone a headset. You know that you know anywhere from you know I have the right next to have the $15 $20 headset to the you know the $300 right. It's a small concession in the long run. When you when that will get them to adapt the new technology, right. You can have the green headset, but you can get up and walk anywhere you want now. Right. You know, and we actually went as far as to actually run the stats of how often people were using the desk. And you know this because we know that these things will come up how hey I use my desk phone every day. Well technically you use it three times two weeks, but you know you want to get that data, because you want to come from a place obviously as a technical I you know I live off data but that isn't quite the same as every other, you know, business they run off their data right so yes but the three calls I have are super important right where I can guarantee like not only will you be able to take the call on a desk phone but you'll be able to take it on your cell phone to be taken on your laptop. So completely you know that number follows you everywhere. And, you know, one of the very tactical things that happened there was, they all kept their same number, which is what you wouldn't think was going to be a crazy thing but it is like the most important thing. So it was, and you only learned that by getting the feedback from. Hey, I don't get phone calls at all. But do I have to change my signature, do I have to change my business card, all of these things need to be accounted for. And that's really where I want to hit that you have to listen to the detractors because that's, they're telling you what, what they're worried about they're telling you their anxieties and you need to be able to articulate how your solution fits those right so you can't do that without listening to them. And if you don't have those those tech days if you don't have all those education sessions. You will not have the opportunity to hear because it's so easy in it to just go back in the back room, work on your stuff. So the next thing, and see if people are using right so if you don't allow for those opportunities, it just doesn't work so it was it what we definitely we went over above and beyond what I would I would consider necessarily so sorry but it actually paid out there. So I just wanted to shift a little bit to talking about some of the technology investments that people are thinking about some of the strategies for what to invest in. And one of the things we did at Parsons TKO was we put out a poll on LinkedIn, you know this was just a very ad hoc to get a sense of what are the organizations nonprofits and mission driven organizations top technology companies for this year and next, and we did this as a LinkedIn poll and I'm going to share my screen so you can see the results, and take a look at this and it's probably no surprise. I'll let you take a look at this. You'll see that. So, I'm curious, like, and I'll ask, you know, pivot to Nate here for a second, like, what do you think this means like what we're obviously in a new area where things are happening both asynchronously in person, distributed distributed remote and so on. What do you think this means. Well, it's an interesting question. I think it means a couple of things so you know some percentage of those answers are related to people experiencing friction in their job, you know various sorts you know and I think that, you know friction is one of the drivers of technology investment in organizations you know when people are unhappy or they're hearing a lot of complaints or executives feel like your team is distracted like priorities and money sense the shift to address this but I also think there's another piece of that I think is more positive which is, I think there's a lot of people who've learned to work in new ways they really enjoy. I mean, you know, there are some percentage of people who like working in the office and leaving home but there's a lot of people who like working from home and having the flexibility and have managing their kids and all those sorts of things and so I think it's also a positive side that organizations are realizing there are new ways to work. You know, one of the challenges is that if you're an organization you're now in an evolutionary space if you're trying a new way to work you know you don't have necessarily historic patterns that you can draw upon. And you know one of the challenges here is that means there's often some experimentation and I think that's some can be challenging in the it or the technology world in particular where people kind of want it to be like going to a deep bow and buying a fridge or something where they come home and install it and it works but it's a lot more like trying to build a dishwasher out of parts, you know, and you might get it right you might not you know you might realize you need a place for pans and you didn't build that in you know. And so I think that's part of this as well as that you know the people are sort of struggling a little bit on terms of what that future work will look like and a simple example is having a meeting in a room where half the people are remote you know where in historic times. There's a huge bias towards people in the office like you might throw it to someone on the phone once in a while but those people would really have to work hard to like get their ideas heard and be involved and there's a real priority on sort of physical presence. I think a lot of organizations, you know, are sort of aware of that on some level and you know they're kind of wondering how can we prevent that and I think the hybrid workspaces investment is kind of a big piece of that which is that it's actually really challenging to run a hybrid meeting and I think people who have done it well, have unique skill sets that they have learned to do that and processes and they can be repeated but they're not things that you organically know how to do and they're not the same skills that you would use to run a purely in person meeting in terms of facilitation and moderation and proctoring. And frankly just a lot of technology challenges like hey somebody drew something on the whiteboard. How do you share that with somebody remote when even pointing a camera at the whiteboard. It's going to be really blurry and hard to read you know who's going to do it and is it going to be disruptive for the people in the in the meeting itself physically. So I do think this is just a sort of brave new world a little bit where people are really starting to embrace this but there's, you know, frankly tiny amounts of expertise that we see an industry about running successful hybrid meetings or hybrid workspaces so I think that's part of it. Yeah. David what are your thoughts about this or there are there any like things that you're seeing from your vantage point like looking at or strategies or anything like that on what to invest in when it comes down to like that hybrid concept. Yeah, definitely. I think all of us have gotten a push for you know hot desk and hotel and softwares. The ability to work that hybrid workspace, I would take a little bit of experience from working in like global organizations which people were just not in the same place anyway. Right so that we just had to figure out but like technology like meet boards and things like that so you can actually write on something physical and still and still have a sense of zoom or teams etc. They actually make a really small device, and I can't recall because it was from me, but I'll send it to you in the notes, but it actually you attach it to a regular whiteboard and it copies it and sends the video to the to the to zoom our teams. But it's those type of technologies are definitely you were looking at it for you know for our space facilities management tools. You know building being able to figure out where someone is if they were truly in the office for all of those contact tracing reasons the fact that you know a lot of you know the vaccine mandates and things like that are being required. So, you know the biggest ask of us are, how do we do hybrid, you know, hybrid spaces how do we know when people are in the office, I need technology for that. I don't know how much space is being utilized so the facilities management side, like, hey we have, you know, for us as the second largest thing that we have, right, is our office space. Are we using all of it. Are we going to be using all of it. Right, you know, and you can't get that without any good data right you stand, you know instead of pulling everybody says yeah I want you. Just in case I come back to it right, but, but you we need real data so that's what we've been being asked for so we've been looking at the, you know, tools like Robin powered which like a hot desk and hotels tool. We've been looking at, you know, service now, you know, facilities management module, they can call something else now. Looking at office things like that, to be able to give more visibility into how we're using our facilities, and also, really, how we are enabling these the return office so we've been re, we've been rebuilding our conference room to be all zoom rooms to to have the capability to have, you know, multiple people speaking at very quickly what you can zoom nowadays like we basically speak one at a time, which you don't really notice it but if you know if you can tell by the amount I talk, if you don't talk, you might get a word it. So, you know that the way that we work in zoom is different than we work in a room. So I that's really where we've been focused on facilities management, and I really think that that's where when when they say tools for remote space and hyperspaces. That's what they're speaking out. How are we utilizing these spaces how can they still be utilized in this new normal. Yeah. That's that's super interesting. I was curious to like just thinking about how the pandemic has forced so many people to become technology experts in a way in a sense, you know and just get comfortable with new things that they weren't comfortable with. We've in our work we've seen some convergence of teams like where technology and marketing and fundraising and different teams across organizations like the lines get really blurred there right like the technology team is is helping the marketing team perhaps and maybe there's a more tech component that's shared across multiple disciplines perhaps we've I know that it enterprise like the communications and the marketing team have combined or with fundraising. So I'm just curious like, if, and this is a question this could be for Nate or David like what what are you all seeing as far as like trends go along these lines with teams having to work together in new ways like and you sort of using this technology to to get to a better position and and and their offerings and they're delivering the mission to their constituents. Yeah, I'll dive in but there's I'm sure David's lots of great things to say about this to me and I think that one of the things that we see is that there's a real convergence of the ways that people work that's been happening for 10 or 15 years you know where, you know, the tools the digital tools that people use to collaborate to design to share things, regardless of the departmental function are becoming more and more similar and, you know, especially where we focus in terms of like audience engagement and outreach. Things like who is a person and how do we interact with them are, you know, sort of ubiquitous from the development team doing fundraising to the, you know, marketing team meeting people for the first time to even the executive team wanting to have one on one's with important people in their peer group or their community or their sphere of influence things like that. And so, you know, just the taking like contacts as an example, you know, most organizations have at least one CRM but sometimes more than one CRM you know depending on you know which part of the organization started to think about contacts first often simultaneous. They often have different outreach tools like email tools and things they're using to communicate with them. Some of them have social listening tools to like listen to the community more widely, you know, other groups have things like donor matching databases or potential high net worth individual matching databases where they're finding contacts from one system and matching them against this list to see if they're worth, you know, investigating for, you know, potential financial support things like that. You know, but in essence what it really means is that collaboration between departments is more and more important and more valuable. And, you know, the role of the, you know, it team is to sort of provide a little bit of expertise on how to plug things in across departments and, you know, that's especially important when the it team doesn't want to actually manage the thing directly, you know, which is often the case in terms of like CRMs outreach tools things like that, you know, really want the experts to be using them in expert ways within those departments, but you don't want it to stove pipe the organization or prevent the organization getting value from that expertise in another area. And so, you know, to go real nerdy here like, you know, a lot of what we do with like our fractional CTO CIO support is help people with these thorny problems with things like data contracting, and how do you have governance between teams, how do you just name the fields. How do you pick tools that are more easy to support those connections with because, you know, honestly, there's often tools that are similar enough that the department would be happy if they went a route or b route right, but from a technology perspective, you know that if they went this route, you'd have a low cost reliable connection between two systems and if you went this other route, you'd have a very dubious handmade hand supported selection, you know, connection between the systems and that's really where the like, you know, David is missing in a lot of organizations we work with right which is no one's really minding the store from that perspective, and a lot of what we're trying to do with that sort of collaboration isn't to like help people do their particular job better it's to help people in the halo around them do their jobs better by having access and collaboration around the same content data, you know, you know whatever that piece of the puzzle is so I'll hand over to Dave that's kind of my my my high little view of it. I don't know I you hit the big points I mean the one of the reasons why, you know, like we said you can't advocate their responsibility. We definitely don't want to run reports for people we don't want to. But one of the things that I and I'm always, I'm always for this is my advice is that the person who has the whoever has the dollars owns owns the outcome right so. I think that one, we want the end you the end user in the business to run their business and their tools as much as possible. But when it comes to that architecture to be a little geeky you, the whole reason for having the simplified portfolio is so that you can get you know holistic security and understanding how that works, hold how how you manage the data and the privacy, how do you get a scalability out of all this data that you're collecting and the ability to look across it right because you actually don't know if you don't run the tool and someone just picked the tool so when you use when I because we, you know, in my situation we own all technology spend so that we actually pay for it. They'll come to us looking for what the if this is, this is requires a lot of work to come to you hopefully with their problem and not what tool they want right with the business problem. And then you can say, yes, out of a and B, and it's fine if they have a suggested tool, right, but it comes to your air be you say hey these are things I already have these are the things that you want to have. I think you should pick be be does all the security things, it will allow us to integrate into our current tool set we keep the data, we can share that data with the other systems that we have. No one knows that but you. Right. So, like, everyone else as a shared service and technology, you see everyone's asked, and you have to build that platform for them all to run. Right. So I totally agree that's literally the reason why you want it simple you want it simple and you want it, then the direct back to you, just so that you can ensure that these things happen. Right, or later on four years later somebody will say hey I really wish I had data on this CRM was created, and they never taught each other. Right. And who's going to pay to integrate right those type of things which yeah the two CRM thing is something I've seen like eight times over I don't know why it keeps happening but it does. Okay, it's usually some departments budget is bigger than another and to your point, somebody is more mature than the other one right so hey I just need something real quick to catch a couple contacts for volunteers. And then that next thing you know they have a thousand volunteers and they're trying to figure out what's going on. So, I totally I totally agree with me. One of the reasons why you want to make sure that you can that they go to you that you can give them that kind of architectures perspective and ensure that it works with the rest because the next app and the next ask will be something that's almost 80% the same right it's literally the same as and if you could just so this is one other piece I will add to it. So I'm always a big advocate for a service catalog portal is just so that people can see this one services you provide but also the tools that you have already. Right because that's, and john will know this, you'll, it's almost like you got to find out by from a guy that you know that you know like there's almost a thing you search around that environment to figure out like, what's our project manager to this anybody to do this thing you know, and if you don't tell them that they will go out and try to get it themselves because they truly that accomplish a job right so that's the other piece I'm always advocate for is telling people what you're offering. Like, if you ask me for help on finding facilities management tool, we will do that we will go and find it we and and kind of getting away from the the office of the know, right like we just won't help you because you know you don't know what you're doing. We do want to be like, no, these come to us because that will allow us to actually scale these these investments. Yeah. So, yeah. Oh, gosh, that's such a good point Dave yeah I mean you're inspiring me with all the stuff you're saying because we just we're a client recently. There's so much so much there I mean you know one of the things that I think you actually mentioned me another day we were talking was that I'm, you know, when there's there's you know this this concept and you know technology management like shadow tech or banded technology where somebody has kind of self installed something or bought something or started to use something just me to need but they kind of did it on their own they didn't really coordinate with anybody, and then it's discovered by other people organization that they're doing it right you're Oh, I didn't know you're doing that. That's interesting. Anyway, you know, you're saying that that often is a map to the services that you might want to offer or that you know that you're offering and I think it kind of reinforces your point about you know good communication but you know we ran into one organization that a very extreme version of that where, you know they had an overtaxed, you know internal support team, and they had decided they were just going to, you know, prevent things like, you know, phishing attacks and spam and all these other things by just locking their outlook email climb down to the teams right and so it was like totally impregnable they thought you know, but they weren't really communicating with their their teams and it turns out another team decided this was too restrictive they haven't any problems and say, they decided to completely replace, you know that with a Google app suite, you know and they started using Gmail, and the email addresses weren't even the organizational email because they of course they couldn't like the domain names and all this stuff and, you know, you know the S team was kind of pulling their hair out you know they're like oh my god, but it was all kind of related to this problem of they didn't have credibility as a good partner to configure and work with those things. The team didn't really know they could come to work with them in that way, and the tool they were giving them wasn't fitting their need and you know, to your point they had the budget they could just go and do it and so you know, and once that stuff gets out that particular kind of things real insidious right like a real tough to remove someone's email pass you've been collaborating with somebody for a year with and so yeah I just think there's a ton of value and you know, be a good communicator like you're saying. Yeah, I mean just imagine it and I can understand like that you know you have some security issue, you know, you know, one of the one of the IT leaders reacts, you know, adversely starts typing at all the stuff down you don't tell anyone. You know, like hey I'm not getting my my my partner emails anymore, some newsletter you don't know all about it like not my newsletter what's going on here right. And before you know it look I have to get, let me give him my personal Gmail, you know, you know, um, oh my gosh, that's just so painful. The shadow IT is a real thing I would actually, you know, I would actually, you know, think that I would actually say that is the, you know, to use a, you know, pronoun that's like it guy, right like you're going to say no, and you don't listen to anyone and you're going to do what you want. And so they don't you're not a partner, you know, and that's a big thing for us, especially the larger we become a more complex is that whole business relationship management and providing someone to go to for them to talk about the change that they need the problems that right, because if you don't, they will go do with themselves is 2021 just need a card. Now you're, you know, unfortunately you and the chief legal officer will have to deal with the fact that your data is anywhere, you know, and it's out there but that's a symptom. This is something that you've been too restrictive. You're, you haven't, you're, you're too restrictive, not even technology wise but you're not, you're not listening to your user base, you know, period, like if they don't feel like they can trust you or go to you. Then there's, you know, you're not really a partner, they could, you know, say this, and, and all, and all reality is that, you know, I when I started outsourcing was a real thing and that is a great way to get yourself out. You know, to not listen to your users. So it is, it is going to be cheaper to be outsourced. Is it going to be better. It shouldn't be. Because they are, they're going for the mean you are literally your job is to be the expert for your business. Right. They are the expert for all 100 businesses that they're supported but that is your job. That's it. Like if they just want someone to give them laptops they can go call CDW drop off laptops it's not a problem. Right. That is your job so you, you, unfortunately you failed if that happens. And you got to recover quickly. You know you should use it as an example it just happened. Let's talk about how we can be better partners, you know. Yeah, well that, I mean that's a great segue to, I know we're running out of time here so I want to make sure we give enough time to for Q&A and also we have a giveaway which if this was a real conference we would call it conference swag, but it's actually hybrid swag I think that's what we'll call it. So let me share my screen and I'll introduce the concept of capacity for change here. So, assessing the capacity for change so we do this activity as part of our road mapping services it's a capacity for change workshop. We've done it a few times with several nonprofits of varying sizes. So really it's to get like stakeholders, executives, people that doing production work, people on the technology side, people that are manipulating the data to really get together and think about, you know, how much can any organization dedicate to change and it's a workshop so we use stickies we use a virtual whiteboard, you know, in the hybrid approach we use Miro for this now, but you could easily do this in a conference room you could print this out, slap it on a real whiteboard and use real stickies with it. But essentially, you know, what we're trying to answer is how much time money and talent can your organization dedicate to change. What are the best times to tackle the change like during the year, maybe this is a project that's a two year project. It's a six month project perhaps. And what are the points of friction and how you can turn them into an opportunity like what David's been talking about. So these are some concepts that we think leaders need to take into consideration. So we're helping organizations ask like how much of yourself can you dedicate to change. And this is very, very, very, a very simplified version of the of the capacity for change wall board that will will give as a takeaway. But essentially there's little buckets and imagine like, and everyone's in a conference room that could be impacted by a particular project, and they're putting down notes, you know, on stickies and sticking them on these different blocks these different cards to sort of indicate. What are the considerations for big and small projects right when and how are you going to do it, you know, during the year, is it going to happen at the beginning of the year is it going to happen during the summer and so on. How are you going to publicize your change you know why are you doing this you know there's probably a different message that you want for leadership for staff for neighboring departments, and for your constituents and external stakeholders if you've got donors that could be impacted by something changing you definitely want to communicate that. How are you going to do adoption and training you know what who's going to do it, when is it done and how is it done. How are you going to collect feedback you know so that you can improve the outcome. How often are you going to collect that feedback. What are some lessons learned you know from past projects this is a really fun one people always know I did this project it went really well, or it went really poorly and they can tell you stories about why it went poorly. What I like to do is find out what made that project go poorly what stage of the project did it happen and what are some things you can institute to make it go better the next time. And then I think one of the most important ones, which we added on with this last client we worked with was empathizing with the project impact that it's going to have on others right this is a really big one like what's in it for them and why should they think about that like if you're doing something that's going to significantly change your organization's way of doing business, or way of communicating with each other. What do you need to think about what's in it for them and I think David talked a lot about you know some of the things that he did at enterprise that really brought people on board but these are some important considerations so. With that I know we only have a minute for q&a but I wanted to leave leave that open for any q&a and any closing remarks. Yeah, well if we have well wait for questions here I'll just close out by saying you know one of the things that the reasons that we think like that that kind of process that change management process is so valuable to do intentionally is that there's so many details and technical projects and there's so much like intricacy. It's really common for these projects to get like stuck in the tree level and nobody's really flying over the forest and being like hey there's a clip over there and there's a nice clearing over the right you know and. This process is designed to also bring in people who don't feel like they have technical expertise to the process which is another really key part of technical projects there's often a sort of, you know, feeling that the technical experts want to win on their expertise and the people who aren't experts want to like stand back and let them do their thing and have it be a little bit of a black box. And in that gap is often where a lot of the lack of quality delivery happens you know and it's not through bad intention it's really through that gap and so this process and this you know workshop is kind of designed to help close some of that gap. I like that I like that form that form is basically my spiel so I didn't realize it looked like that. But yeah I think I think it's in right. Yeah. Well thank you David for joining us. This has been really valuable and helpful I hopeful, hopefully to a lot of other nonprofits and mission driven organizations to thank you for your time. And thanks everybody for joining. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you.