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By Lisa Yoon
Much has been written in the past several years about nonprofit organizations and their becoming more like for-profits in their management and thinking. But Edward Granger-Happ, CIO of the global nonprofit Save the Children, believes for-profits-CIOs in particular-have a lot to learn from their nonprofit cousins. In fact in spring 2008, he spent a sabbatical as an executive-in-residence at Dartmouth's Center for Digital Strategies at Tuck teaching and researching this very topic, among others.
Granger-Happ has spent enough time in for-profit enterprises to be well qualified to understand the lessons nonprofits can offer technology professionals. Before joining Westport, Conn.-based Save the Children, Granger-Happ held IT stints on Wall Street and ran a consulting firm for ten years. Then, nine years ago, he learned that Save the Children was looking for a CIO. Discussions with friends and colleagues arrived at the same thing: The role was a perfect match for his interests in business, technology, and-by now-community service.
"There comes a time [in your career] when you realize the next ten thousand dollars you could earn is not worth the sweat equity," explains Granger-Happ.
At the core of the technology lessons to gain from nonprofit IT management is the budget. The average for-profit firm spends $13,000 per employee on IT. By contrast, IT spend at the average large nonprofit is less than $3,000 per desk. "You have to be ruthlessly pragmatic," says Granger-Happ about making IT effective for so much less. "It takes a roll-up-your-sleeves approach," not to mention, he adds, "the humility to accept help and answers from elsewhere. You're forced to consider partnership options."
For CIOs at profit-making companies, that might sound like a nightmare. But as the saying goes, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. For all the talk from headhunters and career experts about CIOs' need to be well-rounded business people, it is in fact the nonprofit setting that offers the sink-or-swim circumstances for a CIO to get a firm grip on this concept.
Take the scarcity of resources, for example, which begets "ruthless pragmatism" about where to spend on innovation and where technology is, as Granger-Happ puts it, "good enough." In a presentation he gave during his residency at Tuck, he noted that 80 percent of IT is a commodity function; there's no need to innovate where it isn't necessary. In fact, he continued, "good enough" technology, rather than limiting, builds capacity. He uses an automotive analogy: the Honda Civic versus the Mercedes Benz. The less expensive, utilitarian Civic is "good enough" and affords mobility to many more people than the Mercedes. Note that "good enough" does not mean "second-best"; it's just not a luxury. In fact, Granger-Happ quotes Voltaire: "The best is the enemy of the good."
In the private sector, a CIO may or may not try to expand his people skills, depending on his ambition. Nonprofit CIOs simply could not accomplish their jobs without this skill, says executive recruiter Michael Corey, who specializes in recruiting C-level talent for nonprofits at Spencer Stuart. "At nonprofits, CIOs need great interpersonal skills and must be able to get disparate parties together around IT solutions."
This is because most nonprofits tend to be less hierarchical in organization and more collaborative, he adds. At a museum, for example, the fundraising arm may need an exclusive technology that allows them to work together with exhibit developers. The CIO must work with both "customers."
In other words, nonprofits force CIOs to see the IT function in the larger context of the organization the function serves.
To this point, in 2001 after the dot-com bubble burst networking giant Cisco Systems tried out the Cisco Fellow Program, in which the company offered managers a chance to work at a nonprofit, partially subsidized by Cisco with two-thirds of the fellows returning to work at Cisco. Granger-Happ was part of this experiment through his organization NetHope, a knowledge collaborative among a network of nonprofit IT managers.
The managers who returned to Cisco all said the experience was critical eye-opening their development as leaders. They learned, among other things, how to work with reduced resources and how to accomplish more through collaboration. What's more, they learned to take a longer, rather than a quarterly view, of performance and acquired a "holistic" approach to technology; i.e. IT as an integral part of the success of the whole organization. Today Cisco employees have the option of taking several months. As a nonprofit CIO, Granger-Happ himself is especially familiar with these concepts. "My stakeholders are my internal customers.
"The CIO has to enable conversations," he observes, then adds: "It's a soft skill. In the world of technology we need more soft skills."
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