Waiting for Holograms

A lot of people ask me what I see coming up next in the world of nonprofit technology.  I admit it:  I'm not a very good pundit, and I don't like making prognostications. So my routine answer is "holographic software."  It's mostly a joke, but I also often follow it up to explain that the things that are likely to have the biggest impact are the things we can't even conceptualize today.  

 

More concerningly, though, a number of nonprofits are trying to see the future in order to make today's decisions.  In conducting trainings I get questions that are variations on this theme all the time.  So for instance, "Is it worth investing in a donor management system now, when things are changing so fast?"  "If we try to get started with mobile texting now, is it likely that people will have moved on to something else before we get up and running?"

 

I have several answers to this.  First, things don't move THAT fast.  Absolutely, things change, but markets generally change over the course of years rather than months or weeks.  In fact, I expected myself that Idealware's reports and articles would go out of date faster -- but even an article that's three years old is generally still sound in terms of the general shape of the market and the core considerations.

 

Secondly, thinking this way is only going to drive you nuts. Unless you're talking about things on the very cutting edge maturing (like, say, integrating social media activity into a CRM system), I don't think you can predict what's likely to happen in the technology world accurately enough to make decisions based on it. In fact, I'd say that the more rapid changes are likely to be the most radical... and thus the ones that you're least likely to be able to predict.

 

In short, it's pointless to wait for the world of technology to stop changing in order to make your software decisions.  You're simply not going to be able to select a system that will absolutely work for you ten years from now.  All you can do is make the best decision you can based on the information you have now. And then to actually budget to be able to select a new system and move your data every four or five years, if that's necessary.

 

Or you can wait for holographic software to emerge.  I hear it's going to change everything.