Flickr photo: Chris.Corwin

Nothing gets done without leadership. Leaders are the ones who find the peaks we need to climb amongst those clouds. They inspire us to put one foot in front of the other to get there. When we get lost, leaders help us find our way. And at all times, leaders help us enjoy the journey. 

My favorite thing about leadership is that it can come from everywhere.  While we may think of our Executive Directors as leaders, how many of us think of the Help Desk staff in the same way?  But the truth is that leaders lead from wherever they are, even when it's not the corner office. 

Right now, in our sector, we need technology leaders.  We are standing right on top of a critical inflection point, and we owe it to our causes to make sure that we navigate the change as best as we possibly can. So I am calling on all of you to stand up and lead.  We will follow you.

You know where we are going. When you started this work, technology was all servers, Cat5 and HTML.  Technology was all about storing stuff and moving it around more efficiently.  It was monumental, a revolution in its own right.  But in retrospect, it was just the opening salvo in a much larger paradigm shift. Once we could store and share every aspect of our lives efficiently, the stage was set for the real revolution.

And that's where we're headed now, through a time in which the need for our work has never been greater. We're headed to a place where:

• Technology is essential to the success of every aspect of our work,
• Technology is in the hands of nearly every one of our clients, volunteers, and stakeholders,
• Your staff and clients are innovating uses of technology in the field for you,
• It is easier than every to share, collaborate, and aggregate. 

You feel the shift, right? Everyone at every nonprofit, from the smallest to the largest, is much more aware of technology than they ever have been.  And while they may be wary, there is a sense that something important is about to happen.

Because it is, and you are going to lead us there.  Together, the NTEN community is going to make those proverbial thousand flowers bloom.  Here's what we need to do:

1. Let go of commodity technology.  We'll always need servers and email.  But like the paper clip, servers and email have only the most tangential relationship with your mission. As tech leaders, we are going to work tirelessly to get those tech commodities off of our plates an into the hands of the cloud, or a fantastic tech shop.  Instead, we're going to spend our time in program planning meetings and strategy talks, figuring out how to leverage technology to make the work our organizations are doing become that much more effective. 
2. Invest in technology instead of spending. Technology will no longer be an office supply expense! If technology is going to help us meet our missions, we're going to have to measure its impact, just like we measure our financial investments. We're going to research our investments, conduct small experiments, and we're going to measure the heck out of things. That way, we'll learn from our successes and our mistakes and continue to improve the use of technology in our organizations.  Nothing gets people on a bandwagon like success, and nothing contributes more to success than measurement.  
3. Recognize your fellow leaders. The old style of IT management was a command-and-control model.  It was about "experts" making decisions for the end users and mandating those decisions. These days, there are more experts than you think. innovation and expertise in technology can come from any staffer in any role, and technology leaders need to recognize and embrace that.  We need to run IT shops that protect our assets while encouraging this innovation. When everyone's a part of process, the revolution happens much more quickly.
4. Open by default. Feeding people does not end hunger. Solving the issues that we are working on requires that we work across our sector to address these complex problems in equally complex ways. The technology part of collaboration is pretty amazing at this point. Now the only thing standing in our way is our own fear of openness. Tech leaders need to lead this culture shift in their organizations.  We need to ask "Why not?" instead of "Why?" 

We're asking a lot of you. You're busy enough already. But the bottom line is this: we owe it to our mission, to the people and causes we fight for every day, to be as effective as we can.  Anything less is not good enough.  

Just know that you're not alone.  We're going to spend a lot of time talking about leadership in the next year. In addition to videos and podcasts and guest posts from all sorts of leaders in the sector, we're also excited to launch a Technology Leadership Academy this fall with the support of Microsoft. We hope that we'll be able to inspire and inform you, but also have a little fun. We're going to see this revolution through to the end, but like Emma Goldman, we'll take some time to dance.