I changed my car insurance this week, from a company that kept its business logic in its computers to a company that kept its business logic in its people. The premium played a part (2% difference), as did the country in which the call centre was based (wales or india) but what really made the difference was whether the company was set up to respond intelligently to real people.
At the institute of fundraising tech conference this week one issue jumped out of a session about security and seemed to be a bit of a bolt from the blue. It’s something that I have mentioned before in the context of “what price security”. What I didn’t realise at the time was quite how much of a show stopper it would be for some organisations.
In short, improving security can cost money in the digital budget, but save money in the admin or finance budget. Leaving aside the question of what represents good value overall (which is addressed in that earlier post) one conference delegate that I spoke to said that there was simply “no way around” the budget process which separated the digital budget (part of marketing in this case) and the admin budget (in this case finance). This organisations had a clear case for increasing digital security and spending more on getting better quality credit card donations but weren’t doing it because the savings that would undoubtedly be made wouldn’t be visible under the budget reporting mechanism in place.
This is a situation that is becoming increasingly common and you may even have come across it yourself. As digital has a greater and greater impact on all areas of the organisations, the way in which budgets are treated will have to change. Unfortunately I’ve not yet come across what I’d see as an ideal alternative, as the two usual options: a functional department with income and expenditure or a support department providing serves to internal clients both suffer from this problem and others.
I’d love to hear how you’ve dealt with this problem at your organisation, if you’ve got a positive solution to this issue, let me know.
