Flickr Photo: Lawrence OPA couple of years ago, I talked to Ed Granger-Happ about his philosophy for running the IT shop at Save the Children. He told me he was always trying to find the next innovation that would help make the field staff more efficient, or would deliver better services to the people they served.

The work they do is life-saving, so he felt it was important to be always looking for better ways to get it done.

He also recognized that innovation didn't have to be driven by him alone: the amount of innovation is directly related to distance from the home office. In other words, those field staff who were always breaking the rules and systems he put in place were doing so not because they were punks, but because they genuinely needed to find new ways to get their job done.

To me, that makes Ed a hero. 

I've met a lot of nonprofit IT directors during the nearly 8(!) years I've been at NTEN. But I've met very few with Ed's point of view. While Ed sees rule-breakers as an opportunity to learn something and do work better, I've found that a lot of IT Directors, CIOs, and CTOs take a different approach.

I was reminded of this when I was lucky enough to stop by the offices of Do Something. (And if you're ever in New York, you should stop by, too. You can learn a lot in that place.) Over a game of Foosball, which George Weiner, the organization's CTO, was kind enough to let me think I might have a chance at winning, we talked about running tech at an organization of 20 staff and a community of nearly 2 million teenagers.

As he explained his philosophy for getting his job done well, he said the one thing he could not understand were tech people who create fiefdoms at their organizations.

You've probably worked with one at some point: the tech staff who will fix your problem, tell you what NOT to do, but not tell you how they solved the problem; the ones who say no to every request and idea that doesn't come from their department; the ones who make rules, but never tell you why; the ones who assume you don't know anything about technology -- and kind of like it that way.

Now, there are legitimate reasons for some of this behavior. All those zeroes and ones that your IT team deals with every day are immeasurably valuable to your organization. It's their job to keep it safe.

But, as George argues in a Huffington Post article, "At what price, Innovation?" Technology isn't just about servers and application management anymore. Technology lives in every department. And this requires new rules of engagement.

It's a topic we took up awhile back in a webinar, "The Artichoke vs. the Egg." But what do you think, IT types? As technology has moved around the nonprofit, have you dug deeper moats, or are you building bridges?