By Peter Campbell

I'm organizing a session at the upcoming Nonprofit Technology Conference in Seattle. "Taking it to the Streets," about using technology to provide direct client service. The panel will feature Sean Dewitt of FCNY, Paul Hagen of Exponent Partners, and Paul Lamb of StreetTech. We decided to subvert our original topic a bit to incorporate what we consider to be the real street level service challenge: how to effectively collaborate with partners and local governments to develop technology solutions.

My experience at Goodwill is that we all want and need to collaborate. At the same time, we are not always willing or able to make the proper commitment to a successful collaboration; and, often, our desire for the outcome outweighs our willingness to be honest about our level of commitment, and deep investments are made in projects that never come to fruition.

By way of example, a few years ago I advised a local consortium of community based organizations on a project to develop a Web-based portal. At one of the big project meetings, all parties were informed that this portal would provide great efficiencies and services for our mutual clients, but would require some dual entry on the part of the members. The portal comprised a Web interface for matching clients to services and a backend client tracking system. We hired a programmer and developed a beautiful portal, at which point the members reneged, with the complaint that while they liked the portal, they could not handle the data entry.

A few things were lacking here: honesty, commitment, flexibility and imagination. Had we been honest about our resources or committed to our agreements, the project would have either been nixed before the work began (and funds were spent), or we would have found a way to support it. Had we been flexible and creative, as well as committed, we could have pooled some efforts into automating the data entry from our individual, diverse client-tracking systems.

I walked away with some lessons learned, one being "get it in writing." The other lesson was that creativity is the key. Web 2.0 technologies, like RSS, offer methods of transferring data from Website to Website, and piggy-backing on single points of data-entry.

We not only need to honor our commitments to collaborate; we also need to architect them in ways that provide the most reliability with the least amount of extra labor. And the Web is full of tools and services that we can piggyback on - we don't need to invent our own custom versions of the wheel, particularly if the existing ones have worked out some of the labor issues.

I've been very good here and I haven't mentioned the dirty word that I think also underlay some of our failure: "politics." It needs to be about the clients. That doesn't mean that we, as community based organizations and business people, don't look for returns, such as the ability to claim outcomes and receive compensation for our efforts, but it does mean that we rise above our territorial disputes in order to be more effective.

So let's hold a conference in Seattle that speaks to using technology effectively. And let's keep in mind that technology is an enabler, by default. It's people who choose whether or not to take advantage of that.

Peter Campbell is Vice President of Information Technology and Facilities at Goodwill Industries International. He is based in San Francisco.

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