I’m at an interesting intersection in my career path. I just concluded eight years at a small, statewide health care reform nonprofit in Massachusetts called Community Partners. I was Technology & Strategy Director there. Like so many orgs around us, we went under a month ago due to the bad economy. Though I am sad to lose my wonderful co-workers, it was coming for a long time, so I was somewhat prepared. A long time ago, other organizations and foundations started asking me lots of technology questions. This has naturally parlayed into consulting.
At this juncture where I have a sense of what it's like to work in a small org and am also looking at and helping larger orgs and foundations to make decisions about tech and use it in smart ways, I’m thinking a lot about something I call "supported open source."
"How do I choose a CMS?" is one of the most frequent questions I get. "Should I go with a closed but well-supported system or should I venture out into the Badlands of Open Source?" There is another way! That is supported open source.
The perception is often that if you choose open source—even if you hire additional expertise to initially build your site—you have to have skills in-house to keep it going after launch. I think the perception that you're on your own with open source is one of the barriers to its adoption for many businesses and nonprofits. But there are companies and consultants that will stick around, long after your site is launched, to give you the help and support you need. And there are different ways of doing this based on your org's budget.
At Community Partners, we ran things on a shoestring. I build web sites, but I don't write custom PHP code. When we wanted to use a profile module to collect contact information from users on our Drupal site and sync it with our Access mailing list database (yes, I know... Old Skool...), I found the module. It didn't work right. This functionality was a priority for us, though. Luckily, we maintained a contractual relationship with a Drupal consultant who would help us out with our site when our budget allowed. We only paid him to help us when something was broken, or when we wanted a new feature we couldn't implement ourselves and we had the funds to do it.
Having someone you can pay to give you support only when you need it is clearly cheapest way to go. If you're rolling in money, however, having a company on-call 24-7 to support you with anything you need is the other end of the spectrum. And everything in between exists. I want to disclose here that at present, I have a paid relationship with a consulting firm called OpenIssue LLC, which offers a spectrum of services for open source CMS platforms. I am working with them because I am becoming increasingly convinced that supported open source is has some serious advantages for our sector.
I am dogmatic about not being dogmatic, and the needs and mission of an org should always determine what technology they choose, not the other way around. You're never married to a piece of software and you should change platforms if and whenever it serves you. But particularly during this time of economic uncertainty, there is something comforting to me about software that's being developed by a worldwide brain trust. Open source software can't be yanked out from under you if funds (temporarily) disappear, or if a contract expires, because we all own it.
Though this community code base can be messy, open source development specialists know how to clean it up for you. So you get that worldwide scope of innovation, plus the focused attention on your org's particular needs. For orgs that want to stay innovative but don't always have cash flow, this can be a great solution. Ongoing support can be stopped and re-started as needed when there are budget troubles.
I know of a few companies out there that explicitly offer ongoing support for open source platforms. My fave among these is PICnet. Non-Profit Soapbox is designed to be an affordable, fully hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) way for nonprofits to build sites quickly and easily in the Joomla! CMS. PICnet has been around for a long time, and honestly I don't know why more companies aren't offering open source SaaS for nonprofits. Seems like a great idea to me. Here are a couple more companies that offer ongoing support:
I predict more of these companies will emerge in the coming year, and I think it will be a great leap forward for our sector. Do you know of a company or a consultant that offers ongoing support for open source software platforms? If so, I'd love to know about them. Please add them in the comments.
For the third time this week, a software vendor salesperson made sure to slip in how one of their fancy clients do things with their software. They don't just come out and say, "Obama endorses our software." Rather, they say, "when the Obama team logs in, they enjoy the following features...". Wow, Obama for real? I guess the software must be great!
Normally I just ignore this stuff like I ignore annoying radio talk show billboards on the highway - you know the ones, where the sleezy male DJ has his arms draped around some swimsuit models. But the last vendor to do this actually dropped a name of one of our clients. And, this client is actually dissatisfied with this product, and has been for almost a year now. Whoa, back up there! I found myself asking lots of questions to the vendor about the tools this client "enjoyed" in the system, and what makes this such a great fit for them.
Donning the hat of a real SPY (Software Private eYe?), I made sure to stay underground, never divulging my connection to the client. As I mined into the questions, I realized the salespeople knew nothing about how the client actually uses the system. As it turns out, the client has never worked with these sales people. The sleezy vendor is just using this client as a billboard to sex up their product, and its all a complete lie.
After ratting them out to my client, I felt a little better, and a little sadder. It left me wondering, how many consultants and vendors name drop with such impunity? I mean, should I just show up at, say, Apple's doorstep and lob a marketing plan at them, then run? They might never know what hit them... I guess FivePaths could claim to have contracts with Comcast and AT&T, and we have received significant praise from major banking institutions telling us how valuable we are to them. Who cares what these contracts are, or whether the praise came in the form of credit card junk mail?
Maybe we should do a term search across the websites of all known consultant and software vendors to see how many of them claim to work with the same big names? Hey, we could aggregate all this in [insert favorite CMS here] and allow comments! Snopes for name droppers. Thats what we need!
Yes I did just finish In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, which has been really helpful to me in separating real food from cheap imitations. It's my newest filter for navigating the grocery store, providing an easy to follow set of best practices for avoiding nasty edibles that cause us more long term harm than good. And yes, this book can even help us with software selection.
Michael Pollan reinforces that we must be careful when we enter a unfolding situation, already having decided on certain outcomes. We software experts and users spend a lot of time grouping software into similar features, development models, support system, company backing and more. This work is extremely useful to helping our understanding of software, but must always be taken with a grain (or two) of salt.
So how do we keep our critical eye sharp without getting overwhelmed with the myriad of possibilities when evaluating software?
(1) Frame your context
Understanding your organization processes are key, we software geeks say this all the time. Also important is understanding your organizational capacity to change. Important factors include internal staff expertise, general workload, organizational growth pattern, and system of governance. Defining how you do the work you do helps eliminate features and services that are unnecessary or come into conflict with your organizational context.
(2) Use filters
Filters can help us make sense of complexity by removing some of the detail. Quality software reviews are very helpful filters as they provide both strong context describing who the review is for, and well defined categories to help you group software according to common and critical needs. Internal organizational experience with software are also great filters as they come with institutional knowledge of the organizational context, offering a unique opportunity to combine this knowledge with software experience to shape well fit decisions.
(3) Be discriminating, don't discriminate
Look behind the filter to understand what it does not include. Often filters will look at software from certain perspectives that hide important information. I often run into this problem working with nonprofit associations, for which many vendors have created "association management software". A smartly compiled list of best vendors in this space is a great filter to have. However, it turns out the needs of associations are far more diverse than these association management packages support well. By limiting the focus on association management solutions, nonprofits often miss out compelling offerings provided by donor, membership, constituent management and content management vendors. Vendors generally are one good source of information about their products, however it is much better when verified against independent sources with specific experience using the vendor services.
(4) Test assumptions
Keep a critical eye on your plan for a new system. How many "needs" are supported by assumption versus research? Some nonprofits face difficult change management issues by launching a new system where the core users were not adequately engaged in planning and implementation. Others are disappointed to find that features that claim to be present really are no good for their needs. Beware the salty snacks - some tools make it seem so easy to keep adding fields or new features, but they can make your system very sick with bloat if overindulged. Understand the source of any advise or reviews you receive - what is their context? Who is their intended audience?
Database Designs isn’t just about databases but I still spend a lot of time thinking and strategizing about them. Recently, I have noticed that, with some exaggeration, you could divide up much of the population of database managers into those trying to get data out of spreadsheets and those trying to get data back into them. From dust to dust, from spreadsheets in to spreadsheets out, data collection seems like burdensome toil for many. Maybe those flying closest to the sun, with large budgets and staff, truly escape, but most of us still struggle.
On the one side, no matter how powerful one’s database or CRM, administrators find themselves regularly battling users who keep their real data separately in spreadsheets. Not the official data, yet what counts day to day. At a 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference session on tech planning, a speaker commented that a good technique is to just walk around and see what users are actually using at their desk, regardless of the organization’s prioritized software systems. Yup, that struck a chord.
On the other side, in evaluating systems, its easy to focus on the processing workflow, data collection fields, interactive usability and get to “reporting” last. Under-budgeting for reporting and data exchange is an easy trap to fall into.
Absence enough attention to these things, your staff's data world may remain spreadsheet driven. Here’s some thoughts.
In software planning and selection, tie every feature discussion back to reporting. Reporting today is not just neat formatted lists and labels. It’s also spreadsheets, mailmerge, email list sync, mobile and beyond. One of the reasons I have continued to have affection for Microsoft Access is its powerful reporting system, to which its adherents then layer on additional utility over the years. If you have Office, you have a pretty useful tool at hand, even if your data sits in SQL Server or on the web in MySQL or other databases. It shouldn’t be that hard anywhere.
Salesforce has a great reporting tool once you get used to it. CiviCRM, long dogged by absence of output mechanisms, now is on the verge of addressing this. And it doesn’t have to be in big, complex systems. And definitely check out the truly smart “Smart Lists” component to Mission Research’s GiftWorks software. As a reporting tool builder, I'm envious.
Going further, staff fundamentally do not want to enter the same data twice. If they do, it’s more likely because they can’t make the actual lists they want than that important data collection fields are missing. Even if you have made sure you have the right tools, it is so easy to short time for customizing the reporting features or in training on reporting. Adding another custom field or two to a web page typically takes a lot less time than getting it into appropriate search pages or output templates. You have to consider all of it in planning for reporting. An easy way to protect yourself is to include reporting elements in each phase of a projects implementation, instead of having a giant reports phase at the end.
Third, there is life beyond spreadsheets. Some of the most exciting stuff at the 2009 NTC had to do with using free and low cost tools for visualizing data. Visualizing data can mean any framework that enables the information you want to organize come alive in context. It can be putting it on an interactive map. At the 2009 NTC, Peter Black showed some done for the Environmental Defense Fund (edf.org) such as this not-so-fun exploration of sea level rise: Or , check out Google motion charts and the work it is based on at gapminder.org.
Data visualization is a whole separate topic. I’ll just say that thinking creatively with today’s tools about visualization is also part of how to break out of the dust-to-dust, spreadsheet in to spreadsheet out framework for data , and to perhaps generate greater enthusiasm for and quality of data collection.
Heading out to NTEN.org's annual Nonprofit Technology Conference, my mind is generally on what's new and useful. Lots of sharing to make the best choices when organizations outgrow their systems, know it, need to figure out what comes next, and how to make it last. And it's interesting times for this, with software and Internet infrastructure evolving so fast now.
Where old systems clash with new strategies or programs, solutions may be complex, but at least everyone knows change has to come.
I also have been thinking about other situations where technology continues to soldier on year after year, meeting important needs with occasional adjustment and improvement. Two strange encounters with the persistence of the old kept me on the edge this week before leaving town.
In one case, I unexpectedly heard from an organization where years ago we programmed a complex integration scenario between their web site and back end data system. Daily work depended on tools which now have not been updated in years, and were no longer well-supported by the vendor. But they kept running and over the years, and we hardly heard from these folks anymore. Major hardware failure and emergency web site upgrade prompted a call back to us for our piece. Nothing like wrestling with detailed configuration documentation last updated in 2002-03 to reconnect everything up.
This conjunction of the NTEN new and some clients' old brings me back to one of the most confusing terms in technology planning -- “legacy system.” I used to think legacy system meant something specific. Like using non-relational databases—don't get me started on that. Now it seems like it can refer to anything that is in place, operating smoothly, yet old and somewhat a mystery. One person’s target of opportunity is someone else's bastion of reliability.
Folks in our position find ourselves urging “no” to the new as often as “yes.” Just because something is old doesn't mean it needs to be replaced. You just don't want to wait too long.
Reflecting on both my fun situations of the week on my way out to NTC, I condensed the kinds of evaluation questions that could go into deciding when that database or web system of yours is not just old or legacy, but genuinely in need of elements of the new. (Again, these are considerations separate from new needs or changing strategy.)
How well does it integrate into other systems? Today, we want our data to move freely and serve flexible needs. While it has always been possible to get alien systems to talk to each other, newer, lighter weight web services can make a huge difference to organizations in a community network, for supporting researchers and advocates, or closing the loop on registrations, orders and supplies. The more you depend on such things, the more you want the new and fresh and not the obscure and cumbersome.
How hard or easy is it to get support from the software's creator or vendor or to talented developers who can work on it, either as staff or consultants? This is one differentiator, say, between Microsoft Access and Filemaker Pro, and in the future it will be between emerging web platforms like Salesforce and older networked based databases.
Does the system require special hardware or software, which may make it hard to maintain. Fundraising software no longer supported on Macs comes to mind, or web software that works better on Windows Server 2000 than on Server 2003 and beyond. Related, as commercial web hosting continues to get cheaper and easier, how portable is your software to the Internet “cloud”? This can be an issue of budgeting, support, not to mention your carbon footprint.
How much has your software become a “black box”--software for which you have limited technical documentation and few staff with much understanding of what is there. Some customized code may be so complex and obscure that even though it works and even though you have the source code, it might be easier to start over than to embark on learning enough to make changes
Are you burdened with proprietary licensing and formats that you no longer can have full confidence in. Though not an argument in itself for Open Source, it is one of the advantages offered by well-supported Open Source software, like the CMS projects analyzed in idealware's recent report.
There may be other ways to look at this. In the end, you need to have your own dispassionate, objective ways of separating out “legacy” into old yet still functional from the truly in need of replacement. Hope this helps.
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