Recently I came across 2007 IT Staffing Survey: Take it Now! on NTEN site. They plan to publish results of their survey in January 2008.
One of the findings of their 2006 Survey indicated that “More than 95% of nonprofits routinely outsource specific IT functions.” This makes me wonder how far the issues raised by Nicholas Carr in his polemic during 2003-2004 (IT Doesn’t Matter) are relevant to understand investment decisions by nonprofit - both for IT staff and IT infrastructure.
Describing his posting IT Doesn’t Matter he wrote:
I examine the evolution of information technology in business and show that it follows a pattern strikingly similar to that of earlier technologies like railroads and electric power. For a brief period, as they are being built into the infrastructure of commerce, these “infrastructural technologies,” as I call them, open opportunities for forward-looking companies to gain strong competitive advantages. But as their availability increases and their cost decreases - as they become ubiquitous - they become commodity inputs. From a strategic standpoint, they become invisible; they no longer matter.
Carr’s new book (2008), The Big Switch, targets the emerging “World Wide Computer” — dummy PCs tied to massive server farms way up in the data cloud.
It seems that while evaluating IT investments and staffing by Nonprofit one would need to take into account these changes and arguments. Today IT is becoming a commodity and a big switch from the desktop to the data cloud is gaining momentum. May be it is time to incorporate these emerging trends into our analytical frameworks. It quite likely that evolution of IT in Nonprofit might follow patterns one observed in business sectors few years ago.