A few weeks ago, Howard Anderson wrote a column titled, “The life of a CIO: It’s not pretty", in which he used the example of his friend Gomez (not his real name), the CIO of a large company. If the job Gomez has is not pretty, then it must be downright ugly to be the CIO of a large nonprofit organization (NPO).

My friend Claire (not her real name) heads the IT department at a regional NPO that serves more than 80,000 people in Southeast Texas. Claire faces many of the same technology issues that Gomez does, with one big exception: her budget is a fraction of a corporate IT budget.

Most public-serving NPOs operate on a shoestring, given that their money often comes from grants, donations and a shrinking share of United Way contributions. If a corporate CIO thinks it’s tough to tin-cup the business divisions for funds for that great new project, he should try raising funds by selling peanuts and cookies and asking the public for donations.
The corporate CIO moans when he has to stretch his PC lifecycle to three or four years before buying replacements. Claire, on the other hand, is grateful to receive those old hand-me-downs through a United Way program that funnels “end of life" corporate equipment to NPOs. Claire’s staff supports a wide variety of equipment that is one or two generations behind today’s technology. They would love to standardize on one device or even one vendor, but as the saying goes, beggars can’t be choosers.

Claire’s NPO has probably 100 or so employees spread across multiple locations. Some would like to work from home but can’t because they aren’t able to access office systems from home or other remote locations. The organization is trying to roll out VPN service for all employees, but budget constraints are hampering that project. Claire has to depend on software licenses structured for NPOs, and they are often very limiting — if they are available at all. At times, she doesn’t have the luxury of choosing her software applications based on features and functions; she has to acquire whatever can fit into the meager budget.

Claire maintains a database of at least 80,000 current members (customers) and another couple hundred thousand former members. Every customer record has to be updated or archived at least once a year, and in the span of a few weeks during the fall, she adds a few thousand new customers to the database. This kind of activity puts a strain on the old hand-me-down servers in the data center, but somehow they manage.

Disaster recovery planning is a part of Claire’s job, too, and Southeast Texas is especially prone to hurricanes and floods. One of the organization’s remote locations was knocked out of commission two years ago by Hurricane Rita. Fortunately the United Way of the Texas Gulf Coast provides a failover site in the event Claire’s NPO encounters problems again, because Sungard’s services are way beyond the scope of her budget.

Earlier I referred to the IT department. It’s really just a handful of talented and very resourceful people. Claire needs a bigger staff, but — repeat after me — there’s no budget. (Are you seeing a theme here?) While I’m not privy to salary information, I’m guessing these people make a fraction of what their counterparts in corporate America make. This makes it tough for Claire to attract and hold on to good talent. If Gomez thinks it’s hard to find good people for his department, he should cut the salaries in half and see who accepts his job offers.

Claire’s organization knows the value of good IT and does whatever it can to support her efforts. The NPO does allocate capital funds to cover major expenditures, such as network infrastructure and telecommunications. Still, Claire’s IT wish list is long. I have the utmost respect for how much she manages to accomplish with practically nothing in her coffers. Most amazing of all is that she can still deliver a good customer experience, even if it is on a shoestring.

So for all those corporate CIOs who think their lives aren’t pretty, maybe they need another benchmark.