Ed Granger-Happ, Unified Chief Information Officer of the US and UK at Save the Children, and Chairman of the Board of NetHope, Inc., was selected in 2007 as one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in IT and one of the Top CIOs by the editors of eWEEK, CIO Insight and Baseline. Before joining Save the Children, he was a senior partner and founder of HP Management Decisions Ltd., and has held a variety of corporate management positions. He was interviewed by New Europe’s Magdalena Zackova at the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2009 in Cairo which found many well-known personalities and analysts congregated to witness innovation.
Could you tell us more about Save the Children?
-Save the Children is actually a federation of 26 organisations in a variety of countries like the US, UK, Sweden or Norway. We have programmes in over 100 countries. We have been in operation in the US for over 75 years and I believe we have just passed our 90th anniversary in the UK. So, we have been an international non-profit for a long time in a variety of categories, we practice emergency relief, we do development programmes in health and education, HIV and AIDS, economic opportunities, food security and alike. I joined nine years ago, it is my third career, and I did my first career on Wall Street with Wall Street information providers. I am glad I am not on Wall Street now. And I did manager consulting for 10 years and then the Save the children for nine. Charles Handy, the English writer, says you can expect to have five careers in the post-modern world, so the next one I teach and then I write after that and that’s five for me.
What is the role of IT companies and technology when it comes to solving the world’s toughest problems?
-Well, I think technology’s promise has always been to make people more productive. In non-profits we talk about that as building capacity. Essentially they mean the same thing – how can the same number of people have more impact. And so in our case is on how can we have an organisation that is able to reach twice the number of children without having twice the number of employees to do that. Technology is sort of one of those things that you can do to impact and reach more people.
Where do you see the future of these projects, Save the Children and NetHope, and how has its role evolved because of the current crisis of various types … we have economic crisis, environmental and human rights crisis?
-The economic crisis, to take it as an example, is one that impacted us dramatically among the NetHope members. In many of the non-profits they have had lay-offs, have had budget cuts and travel expense reductions and the like. So for example at Save the Children we were doing a lot more video conferences instead of travelling and having face-to-face conferences. That is an example of people leveraging the technology to address the economic situation. I look at IT technology in the shape of a pyramid, kind of appropriate for being here in Cairo. The reason for the shape of a pyramid is because most of what we do is for that broad base of the pyramid is keeping the lights on and stuff, we’re a large international organisation and there are basic things that we need to do with technology, like email and the like. which dominates most of our IT budget. And then as you move up the pyramid, you get closer and closer to children, so the next sort of the operational level of how do we do things like we have to run finance systems, we have to run HR systems and big corporate systems. And then how do we have applications and systems that help deliver programmes in the field, so that we can be more effective on a programme delivery. We have a saying, that if you are not serving a child directly, then you are serving somebody who is. So for the IT department, one of our primary customers is that field worker, a person who is working directly with the child. The top of the pyramid is technology that actually is used directly by children themselves. Part of my job is even to just discover where those are happening and shine a spotlight on it. So these are things we can do in our NetHope organisation and across the different countries with Save the Children.
I see that you are trying to save the children, to help them, but what policies, fields or tools do you apply in practice?
-A variety of approaches, on the one hand, we have a strong programme in advocacy where we advocate for policy changes in governments, particularly advocating for the rights of children. We have very active programmes among some of the Save the Children members on combating child soldiers and the likes. The rights of a child are something that is foremost in our minds and the advocacy work that we do. The other end of the spectrum would actually be distributing food and water packets in drought or famine areas or in a disaster area. And then everything in between. We operate on that old principle that says that we would rather teach somebody how to fish than give him a fish, because then they can be sustaining. We work through communities and our community mobilisation means that we meet with the elders at the village council and execute the programmes through and with them, so that they can continue them after we get them started. In that sense, in many cases we incubate the change.
You have said an interesting thing that you are trying to engage governments. Do you try to reach to all the governments without any exception, or do you have states excluded from that, for example how is it like with rough regimes as Sudan, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, Iran, Myanmar?
-I think it’s an interesting balancing act, because on the one hand, we are very clear that we are non sectarian and non-partisan organisation , so that we are not aligned with any political persuasion, we are not aligned with any religious persuasion, but we want to go as a mutual party and do what is right for children. I think that advocating with any type of government on anything that is going to improve the lives of children, most governments want to do right for their children. And it is sort of a universal, you know, no one wants to harm children. Sometimes its gentle persuasion, sometimes is shining a spotlight on an issue, writing a position paper or alike. So, I think we do a balanced job, a very good balanced job. We try to do whatever it takes to serve the children.
In 2007 you were selected as one of the 100 most powerful people in IT. Could you assess the main changes that transformed the IT and how is it going to go forth? And what about the crisis, is it more an inhibiting or accelerating factor, when it comes to new creative ideas?
-First of all, the award that Ziff- Davis Publishing Group gave me, I was very honoured to receive. I think it was largely due to the work founding and starting NetHope, which is that collaboration among the 26 world’s non-profits I mentioned earlier. That collaboration model is something that Microsoft has been a huge supporter of, recognizing that we are talking about impacting people in need around the world. We gotta do this more together, instead of individual one-off types of requests and partnerships. That aggregating function, bringing together all those who are doing technology in the non-profit world together as one group that is working with a partner like Microsoft and others to apply technology in those environments. That has been something that Microsoft recognized very early and has been a big supporter of NetHope. And was very clear about saying - the reason for supporting NetHope is because this model of collaborating together is the future that non-profits need to follow. I think other organisations are interested more in how do we collaborate more particularly with the economic pressures.
blog comments powered by Disqus
