Thomas Bell, Director, Integrated Technology Initiative, Ashoka: Innovators for the Public

There is a room at the Ashoka offices in Arlington, Virginia, a room that would be familiar to many IT managers, filled with servers - racks and racks of servers. These servers produce lots and lots of heat, so in addition to the servers we also have air conditioners that we run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to keep these racks and racks of servers cool. Since these servers provide mission critical services to our international operations, such as email, file storage, backup, and the like, they require constant attention to ensure the hardware and software is functioning properly. To this end, we engage a team of people dedicated to spending at least some of their time tending to these racks and racks of servers to keep them running, accessible, and secure. Now, imagine this same pattern being repeated at thousands of NGOs around the world: certainly not the most efficient use of resources.

Information technology is capable of transforming the NGO sector’s ability to efficiently and effectively serve their constituencies. From back office systems (e.g., email, CRM, finance/accounting) to mission-focused solutions (e.g., m-health, e-government, disaster response), information technology has enabled NGOs to leverage often meager resources to provide services and reach communities in ways that would have been impossible without an information technology solution. Having said that, the model in which each NGO must create and maintain the infrastructure to support its use of information technology - its own serverfarm and datacenter - is coming to a close. Advances in server capacity, every expanding connectivity, and developments in the Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) ecosystems are opening the possibility for NGO IT departments to get out of the business of managing servers and focusing more of their attention directly on the business of changing the world.

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With the support of our friends at Microsoft and NetHope (www.nethope.org), Ashoka has undertaken a project to let go of our existing Exchange servers and migrate onto Microsoft’s recently released Office365 platform in support of our roughly 300 staff operating in over 20 countries around the world. This is no small task, mind you. Ashoka prides itself on encouraging entrepreneurship both within and outside the organization and, as a result, our technology infrastructure has evolved in a highly ‘organic’ way that has required a significant amount of housecleaning in order to take advantage of the opportunities the Office365 platform exposes. But at the end of the day this migration will enable us to remove several of our existing servers from production along with the related backup, networking, power, and maintenance infrastructure taking us one step closer to the aspirational ‘serverless’ NGO goal.

At Ashoka, we believe that there is an emerging system change taking place in the IT field that has the potential to dramatically change the way NGOs access IT solutions both for their back office and programmatic focuses. To be sure, it is still early days in the maturation of the SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS ecosystems and, as such, there are new challenges and risks associated with their use that must be prudently considered. Yet, at the end of the day, we believe that our time and energy are better spent on building the social and technical infrastructure that enables the emergence of the ‘Everyone a Changemaker’ world than on managing servers and software updates. We are exceptionally happy to be partnering with Microsoft and NetHope to demonstrate how these emerging systems can transform the NGO sector use of information technology and, ultimately, enhance impact.