Speaking too soon

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since I wrote my post, a few weeks ago, saying I was done with technology consulting. In one sense, I spoke too soon, although in another, I was right on. And, to some extent, this post is a bit self-indulgent, so if you’re looking for some concrete technology talk, you might want to wait for the next post on Joomla. :-)

I first started doing technology consulting for nonprofit organizations in 1996, with a project for a local public television station (WGBY in Springfield, MA), to design a technology center for teachers to learn about technology and the internet, so they could apply that in their classrooms. It was a great project, and a success, since that technology center is still in operation today. Understandably, it has come to be somewhat different than I designed it back then, but it still feels good that something that I worked hard on is still serving people. And it was the sheer enjoyment of that project – of talking to many different people about needs and desires, thinking about how to appropriately use technology to those ends, that got me out of academia, and into the nonprofit and educational technology world.

I did a lot of planning, evaluation and training in the beginning – some on my own, some with Summit Collaborative. it was what I enjoyed most, and it was what I thought I was best at. But, somewhere along the line, I started to do more and more implementation, because, honestly, that was what my clients needed most at the time. I put in a few networks in the late ’90s (ugh, really, I pulled cable.) I started to do databases for organizations, and then, in 1999, I flew headlong into web application development, which became my specialty and mainstay until I took a break to go to seminary in 2005. At first, I liked it a lot. I liked being able to create things that I thought my clients wanted (and they thought they wanted.) I stumbled a fair bit along the way. I had a hard time being a successful business owner with employees (I pretty much suck at it, so I hitched my wagon to Database Designs Associates from 2003 until this year.) And I struggled mightily with my own capacity to build really good applications mostly without other developers to help out. It was really hard to try and write new applications building on a framework I’d written a while ago, while simultaneously improving that framework, and keeping up with new things such as Ajax and RSS, mostly by myself. It just wasn’t happening very well.

And as time wore on, I lost touch with people and organizations. I sat for hours (or days) at a time in front of my screen without contact with the folks I was doing the work for. And, if there was contact, it was most often on the level of “can you fix this?” “can you add this feature?” I don’t blame them – they needed the fixes, and the features. But that was a pale shadow of the kind of work and contact I wanted with my clients. And I also struggled with the consulting business model. In the early days, as a business owner, I needed to think a lot about sustaining business (I had employees, and I wanted them to eat.) And later, even though it wasn’t a large part of my job description, it still was something that I had a hard time with – like getting yanked out of my flow to answer RFPs.

For one long time client (I had this client for just about all of the span of my consulting career – they were my second client), I had a much fuller, richer role, even though much of the work I did for them was database and web application development, we’d built a great rapport over time, and it felt wonderful when I got the chance to talk with them about bigger picture issues. But that was not so often, and, as staff in that organization left over time, that relationship changed.

When I came back from seminary, I was very clear that I couldn’t do technology consulting in the way that I had come to do it. I couldn’t bring myself to code or design databases, or write connections to APIs, or do any of those things that had become my bread and butter over the past 6 years. I wanted to work directly with organizations and people. So, it seemed to me that I needed simply to leave technology consulting behind, and move into doing things in a more spiritual vein, perhaps.

But then, I had something of an epiphany. And that epiphany was in my post about “Technology Consulting 2.0.” And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me, and the more I liked it. And the more I talked with other people about it, the more it made sense for me to do it. I will hold off for a while yet in my life working with people directly on spiritual issues, and work now with what could certainly be called the spirituality of nonprofit technology – finding balance and looking at the bigger picture. I’m creating a new practice, called MetaCentric Techology Advising. It will include visioning and planning, evaluation and training. All of the stuff that I liked the most about nonprofit technology, and, honestly, what I’m probably best at. And it’s nice to know that all of the last 8 years or so as a “technology vendor” as it were, will be there as good experience and guidance as I work with clients.

I won’t talk much about it in this blog again, but I thought it might be something people would want to hear about.

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