Charity Digital Strategy

At the IoF Tech conference last week there was a lot of talk about the cloud – cloud computing and what it all means.  We had a very interesting back and forth in a session I was in on the topic where we tried to hammer down what really defines cloud computing, and it came down to some key indicators: instantly scalable, pay-by-use, modular and internet-delivered seemed to be the key indicators.

But during the session, I wasn’t that happy with these as ways of defining the key cloud applications: Google Docs, Basecamp and Salesforce.com that people were talking about.  In the session I was struck by a much simpler way of summing up the cloud approach – it’s like lego.  Traditional applications are like clay, and cloud applications are like lego.

We were talking a lot about project management and CRM applications, as other cloud-based applications for Fundraising haven’t made much headway in the UK yet, but the lego/clay analogy works – and really highlights the pros and cons:

• Where clay allows you to build something exactly shaped to what you want, lego doesn’t – you get close, but not exact and you have to change your expectations just a little.
• Clay takes craftsmanship to make something everyone can use, lego’s much faster and much easier to plug into.
• Clay doesn’t scale well – you need to put in the right framework underneath for the final scale, and once it’s started, you can’t change it easily.  Lego scales and you’re building or changing it every day.

So can lego type systems really give us the flexibility to build up the applications we need rather than follow someone else’s hand-crafted creation?  What really brought this together for me though was my eldest daughter who’s just got her hands on meccano (which is much like lego these days I was interested to see).  We spent a happy hour on Saturday building the wheeled crane as outlined in the instructions so that she could lift teddies in and out of various positions in the living room.  When we were done, she was pleased with the result but said “I thought it would be bigger – some of my teddies are bigger than that”.

When I got home last night, she showed me what she’d done: “That crane wasn’t big enough so I took it apart and made this – I can lift my biggest teddy now”.  She’d made a crane about twice as tall, and rather more functional than the original model.  She’s six.

On Friday I’m looking forward to spending some time at the Institute of Fundraising’s Technology Conference listening to a whole bunch of speakers from charities and within the sector talk about their current IT concerns and opportunities.

One of the thing we’re asked most about at the moment is that of “Cloud computing”.  What’s it all about? Why should I care?  In my session during the afternoon I’ll share some of the lessons we’ve learned working in the sector and show how cloud computing is something that charities need to sit up and listen out for.

In the desktop era, our organisations owned and managed our own hardware and software in our own premises, in the server era, we outsourced some of that – the hardware and network side mainly, to data centres and managed hosting firms, but in the cloud computing era, we’re outsourcing the management of everything connected with computing – hardware, software, reliability, backup, the whole shooting match, to suppliers of specialist software and platforms.

It’s an exciting opportunity, one that brings with it new features and capabilities, but also new risks and concerns.  I hope that you’re able to join me on Friday to find out more…

Conference information