CIO Altruism Could Help Convince Nonprofit Funders of the Value of Supporting IT

Writing in InformationWeek, John Soat says that chief information officers in coming years must develop a greater sense of altruism. Perceptively, he observes that information technology is one of those putatively non-impact areas that donors don’t like to fund:

The problem is this: Contributors don’t want charities to spend money on IT because they see it as overhead rather than opportunity. Unfortunately, many in executive management in the nonprofit sector feel the same way.

Soat writes about efforts by CIOs in central Ohio to land on nonprofit boards there in hopes of persuading the organizations that IT expertise and resources are worthy spending money on. But the payoff for that kind of investment can be huge, he notes, which is all the more reason for senior-level IT executives to share their skills with nonprofits.

It’s important for Tomorrow’s CIOs to be involved in charitable work because (a) it’s the right thing to do; (b) CIOs have skills, not just in technology but in project management, that are valuable and needed; and (c) more people need to see evidence that technology is a solution, not a problem. | 501(c)