NTEN D.C. Wrap: Humans Not Yet Obsolete
11:30 PM Oct 12, 2005
NTEN's travelling big top rolled into D.C. yesterday for a more
energetic session than the New York version a few weeks back.
NTEN's shifted this year to packaging events thematically (an idea that
has met lukewarm reception); D.C. had the ambitious charge of "Pulling It All
Together: Data Integration's Impact on Raising Money and
Fulfilling Your Mission." It's safe to say that as the sun set
outside the Marriott, All had not been fully Pulled Together for most attendees. Hey, it's a journey, not a destination.
It
struck me going through the rotation of workshops that technology often
stands in as an object of discussion for what are really business process issues. The last
session of the day, for instance, was about using technology to better
deliver measurable outcomes to funders. Almost immediately, the
conversation shifted away from the unique benefits of technology and
towards the need service providers have to build relationships with
teachers, parents and caregivers -- and the requirement that staff
actually, you know, log the data bits the technology is trying to track.
That old computer saw captures the dynamic: garbage in, garbage out.
Or our own mantra, "it's not about the tools; it's about the
strategy." That's as true of operations as it is of programs.
We
run into outsized expectations for software regularly, often
culminating a sentence begun with, "Does your system do ..." Does
it speak automatically with our highly customized offline
database? Does it force Hotmail and Yahoo to render our html
message the same way? Does it intuit the way we want to sort our
data and then do so without our having to think about it?
Believe it or not, we
actually welcome these expectations, even when they're completely
unfeasible -- they help us develop our platform, and they keep us
pretty tightly oriented around our mission. But there's a mutual
education process involved in these conversations, where we end up
laying out the limits of what can be done technically -- or rather, the
limits given time, budget and the fact that while our system is almost
infinitely plastic if you're prepared to do some coding*, the default
configurations are shared by over 200 organizations each with unique
needs and preferences.
Technology
can do a lot of great things. But at the end of the day, it
doesn't replace the need to apply human intelligence to the
process. And thank heaven that's so. These conferences
would really be slow going without the people.
*Coming soon in this space: a fantastic exemplar of this.
Add a comment
Technology
Sophia — 11:40 AM Feb 25, 2021
Good Work<br /><a href="https://www.google.com">Google</a><br />
[url=https://www.google.com]Google[/url]