Back to the Client Side

On the eve of starting a contract with the national Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (www.JDRF.org)  as a PM  on a number of application customization and roll-out projects, I am struck at how genuinely excited I am to be once again plying my craft on behalf of a client organization, as opposed to a service related role defined by developing solutions as an agent for someone else. While I will miss the intensity and dynamic energy of the agency environment, I must admit a sense of eagerness to once again work from the other side of the fence.

I am also thrilled to have a second opportunity to approach the challenge of integrating  multi-channel constituent information for a caused based organization functioning at national and local levels. [I played a similar role for JFNA (then called UJC) in 2007-2008]. It is interesting to see how the technology leaders of a few years ago have developed, and how the understanding of relevant best practices have evolved. I look forward to getting back into the mix.

Long standing charities have  engaged in direct response donor relationship marketing for decades, developing personnel and data management processes to support mail, telephone and, more recently, email marketing. The convergence of constituent relationship data coming from so many sources, including event attendance and volunteer participation, has pushed the flexibility of the standard database technologies deployed in the 90’s and 2000’s. Compounded by a whole new set of interactions from organization sponsored social web activities, effective and efficient data management for these large charities is a major challenge.

There is an allure for interactive project managers and producers (well, at least for me) to work on the jazzy front end design applications, such as online community portals and killer ipad apps.  As I concluded in an earlier post (The Other CSI Myth), the effectiveness of even the most creative and innovative interactive strategy is only as good as what goes on behind the scenes and the data level. Admittedly, a few years ago this was a black hole for most of us working in the IT management of non-profit organizations in the then current state of web technology.  Only a few years later, it seems the main players have kept attacking the problem, and the maturation of partnerships between applications like Salesforce and Convio have closed the gap considerably.

Success in this arena will still necessitate an elegant orchestration of multiple software services, third party vendors and significant infrastructure choices – and by no means will it be easy. I am ecstatic to join a strong team at the JDRF with an ambitious vision of how interactive technology can facilitate deeper relationships with constituents and stakeholders of all types.

If anyone has related experience or insights to share, please post below.

The Other CSI Myth

For anyone who remembers 80’s television, there was this show called Quincy that starred Jack Klugman as a pathologist who did forensic investigation into murders. I always had a special place in my heart for the show because my father worked as pathologist at the time and, when asked what my dad did for a living, I would say “he’s like Quincy, but without the solving murders part.” Back then, Quincy was often the only forensic investigator  people (especially kids) had heard of.

Fast forward about 20 years and most everyone knows CSI from the multiple TV dramatizations involving super sharp crime scene investigators using ultra cool technology to solve murder cases and bring perps to justice. Many have also heard that there has been a rise in unreasonable expectations from real people who assume their local forensics teams are staffed and equipped like the shows. There have also been spikes in enrollment in CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) training enrolments.

There is another, more technical myth which seems to be one of the root causes of the “un-reality” portrayed on TV.

The cast usually includes a techno-digital savant who can get anything done through a computer. They whiz and quip their way through impossible searches and triangulations – invariably uncovering a piece of data that helps the good guys win.

“I need a list of all buildings downtown that have southern facing exposures that were built between 1950 and 1960, and used the unique building material found on the vics shoes to seal the roof.”

“One minute, Boss.”

“A whole minute? You must be slipping!”

Maybe I’m stating the obvious, but those random pieces of data are not all sitting around in databases that talk to each other, no matter how talented the person doing the searching – no matter how powerful the computer system being used to to the search. I don’t know what’s more crazy, the idea of public city plans integrated, indexed and codified with that type of information for the past 50 years or the on the fly API creation to extract cohesive data from unknown databases (assuming they are all even online) in a minute or less.  NOT that I have any problem with creative license, I just want to call it out for the sake of emphasizing the role of data strategy as the driver for achieving desired front end interactions.

I can just imagine the aha moment when the people at Epsilon realized, “Hey, we hold all this data. Why not build an agency around it (http://www.epsilon.com/Purple@brepsilon/p32-l1).”  Again, it is not enough to own the right data, its data also control of the warehousing structures that must grow and adapt to ever-increasing complexity of user requirements. And with so many local and SaaS computing solutions and data entry points, only the enterprise level seems to have a shot at unifying the structures well enough to enable true capitalization of business intelligence.

The paradigm of single, unified, all-knowing data systems has not proven workable, yet everyone is clamoring for true connectivity. [It must be true, I saw it work on TV…]. I do believe that whatever solutions emerge in this area for small to mid-size companies will come from those who treat data strategy as an input to creative strategy and not the other way around.