Acronym

As we approach ASAE's 2010 Association Technology Conference & Expo, here at Acronym we're reaching out to a few association IT officers this month to pick their brains about the latest challenges and practices in the field. First up is Susan Nouse, chief technology officer at the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials:

Acronym: What is the most challenging part of training staff on technology, and how do you try to overcome that?

Nouse: The most challenging part is the speed at which technology is now changing. It feels like, about the time people are comfortable with something, it's time for the new version. Every time a new version comes out, they add a lot more features and a lot more functionality, so then people still just use what they know because they don't know to take advantage of those additional pieces.

Also, there's the cost involved with training, and with most technology training, even if it's at the application level, it's pretty costly. I'm personally a trainer by trade—I was a trainer before I came here—so I put together a list of topics based on feedback from staff, and I offer an hour-long training session on some application usually once or twice a month.

When it comes to things like a database, for instance, is it easier to train staff around a technology or to try to build a service or a system around what the staff's needs and capabilities are?

What's most important for me is that I choose the solution that best meets the business need. If that means purchasing a product or if that means developing it in house, I'll go both ways on that, because I have done both. But as opposed to trying to base the decision on how people will learn the technology, I try to base it more on what is the purpose of the technology. So what I typically try to do is pull in the people that are going to need to use it and get their input, and if I'm looking at a shelf product then I let them see demos of the product and let them be fully involved in the process of the selection, so then at least they know what they're going to be expecting as we move forward.

With so many emerging technologies, particularly in publishing and communications—with smartphones, iPads, social networking, and so forth—how do you go about picking and choosing which ones to target and which ones to leave aside for both your staff and your members?

That is based on a couple different things. If we hear a call from our membership about something—for example, one of the things that there had been an interest in is having some sort of tool or technology to allow members to communicate in between face-to-face meetings. We have research committees for each of our major functional areas—technology, transportation, facilities, accounting—and a number of those committees said it would be nice if they could continue committee work online outside of the regularly scheduled meetings. So we started by using Ning as a product, because that allowed us to create groups and they could have discussions, and they could post documents. Because Ning has changed their model, we're in the process right now of switching over to a private social-networking product. So that one was a call from the membership: here's a need that we have, here's what we want to do.

Some of it comes from evaluation of what our peer groups are using. We are a state affiliate of the national ASBO [Association of School Business Officers], so we take a look at what other state ASBOs similar to us in size are using. I talked to one of the people from New York ASBO and asked what they were doing so that I could see what had worked and what hadn't for them, and then I could go about making a decision for us. Those are the two techniques I use most.