Enabling technologies (inventions) have brought about faster innovation – now that change is constant, we are all trying to outdo the last incremental change. IT Execs have to worry about faster speed to market, which has shrunk from months to now days and even minutes.
Remember the days when a project had to schedule hardware and software change – and if you missed it on your project plan, either you were running on borrowed capacity or running extremely crippled till hardware was ordered, arrived and was provisioned in the data center. Those days are gone; today, capacity on demand is the norm and “one click provisioning” is taken for granted.
This is the case with the large investment bank that I work for where we have our own flavor of cloud and on demand provisioning; even with with smaller enterprises that can use infrastructure cloud providers (AWS/Azure/Digital Ocean/Google etc.) to spin up containers and add capacity on demand.
Very recently while mentoring a nonprofit, I came across a situation where the founder of a dance studio was forced to work on her IT systems more than the organizations mission. Upon probing deeper, we discovered that while IT tools are excellent productivity drivers, a fragmented landscape of solutions is actually a bigger headache to manage than doing this work manually with a pen and paper. This was a problem of fragmented providers and needing a lot of IT savvy to merge and manage data from the owner and founder of the non profit.
We recommended a virtualized and a consolidated software solution which was accepted enthusiastically. We ended up setting up a word press instance for her in a matter of hours. In fact my 7th grader son pitched in and set up the entire static site for her. Then one of our other volunteers added various plugins like mail chimp and class scheduling and campaign management to the solution.
This is true democratization of tech – it’s not just the monopoly of large orgs with an army of IT folks – anyone can experience this new paradigm and turbo charge their nonprofit/business.
Here’s a graphic that depicts the types of offerings in the market. The boxes in blue represent what is currently available.
