After 16 years, our longest-standing columnist is calling it a day. John Tate reflects on the pros and cons of the advances in technology we have seen over that period.

Once upon a time, long, long ago (actually in 1999) I started to write this column. Now, 16 years and 161 columns later, I have decided to hang up my keyboard and hand over to a fresh face.

During this period I have run and sold two IT businesses and advised a huge number of others; I have been a trustee of several charities, and acted as an adviser to the Charity Finance Group. It is an opportune moment to reflect on the main technology developments we have witnessed in the charity world over this time.

Cast your mind back to 1999. That was the year the euro came into existence; Google had only just been launched and had 11 employees; and less than a fifth of UK households had access to the internet.

Clearly IT has delivered some huge benefits to the charity sector over this period. Web-based and mobile technology, for example, has created opportunities to streamline business processes, deliver high-quality, up-to-date information and provide a platform for whole new ways of engaging with donors, volunteers and beneficiaries.

Look no further than the web for the sales pitches of countless millions of suppliers to see what is possible, and in many cases what has already been achieved. And we have only just started – we have so much more to gain from technology in the coming decades.

Technology pitfalls

But there are also pitfalls for the unwary that charities have to be extremely careful about.

The first is that successfully implementing new technology is fraught with challenges.

Far too many IT projects fail to deliver what is expected of them. People are not very good at making change happen, and suppliers have an ingrained habit of overpromising what they can deliver.

Technology has been around long enough now that we should all realise this. So it is up to a charity to make sure the right level of resource and planning is applied to any new IT activity it is embarking on. If this is done well, a world of opportunities emerge.

My second concern is that the use of technology has a wide range of adverse social implications which we still only have a limited understanding about.

For instance, computers are replacing much of the face-to-face engagement with others that many children would have previously had as they were growing up. For adults the same can also apply.

A 24/7 online culture can destroy a person’s work-life balance. Added to this, the ability to be anonymous on the web allows the evil in our world to do much harm.

A final area of learning is that, in this information age, we need to recognise and respond positively to the fact that technology is driving the transparency agenda – much more data is now being revealed, on an almost daily basis, about the good and bad of how charities operate, thanks to the internet.

The transparency agenda

Our response to this will determine the future of the charity sector.

Unfortunately, all too often in my view, finance directors, chief executives and trustees are too defensive about what is going on – for instance with senior staff pay – rather than embracing the growing demand for more transparency. Public trust in charities is falling and will continue to do so unless, and until, this changes.

So if we want to make a quantum improvement in how charities are run we need to encourage charity leaders to operate in a spirit of greater openness.

Technology can support this, but it cannot on its own make this happen.

In closing I’d like to thank the editors of Charity Finance over the past 16 years for their patience and support wading through the thousands of words I have written.

I’d also like to thank you, the reader, for your encouragement and positive feedback.

Finally I’m tweeting my very best regards to the late Dan Phelan, who founded Charity Finance 25 years ago, asked me to write this column and became a very close friend. I hope to see many of you at his memorial event on 14 October.

John Tate is a business consultant, and a visiting lecturer at Cass Business School.