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.