There is barely a not-for-profit, social enterprise or government body I can think of that wouldn’t benefit from a Duncan Parkes or a Matthew Somerville on the payroll, so long as they had the intelligence and self-discipline not to park them in the server room. Why? Because just one person with the skills, motivation and time spent learning can materially increase the amount of time that technology makes a positive contribution to almost any public or not-for-profit organisation.
I agree, though Tom’s developer-centric view of this should probably be widened for it to be a bit more inclusive.
I like your headline. Reminds me of the post grad education options for civil servants. I think one of the UK biz schools offers a MPA (Master in Public Administration) however, last time I looked at it it was fairly generic and didn’t explicitly address technology management.
However, other institutions do address the issue. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government ran a series of executive education seminars under the ‘Leadership for a Networked World’ banner. Which, I think, quite neatly captures the need for senior leadership to re-orientate themselves in acknowledgement to the impact tech can have.
To Tom’s point of increasing the positive contribution of technology… I was fortunate enough to attend two of the LNW seminars and recall that one of the visiting professors made a great point about how much harder it is to sell-in tech benefit. His argument was that the perceived benefits of the incumbent systems are usually over estimated by 3x. The potential benefits of the new system are under-estimated by 3x so the new system needs to be perceived as delivering 10x (3×3 +1) more to get over the hurdles.