IT Leadership: How AI Can Evolve The Charity Sector And Digital Transformation Best Practices

Over the past two years, AI has produced myriad use cases that span many different industries. However, the passage of time has also opened up applications for the landmark technology unique to each sector and space.

For Kuldip Sandhu, Managing Director at both Overture and Innovative Quality Solutions and an experienced interim CIO and IT Leader, he is observing and assessing first how AI can revolutionise NGOs and charities.

“I think AI can be very disruptive, but for me, getting AI right requires an understanding of the business problem and need,” Sandhu told UC Today. “What is the use case you are fixing, and then thinking about the technology? Is it a chatbot? Is it a piece of software that will automate our business processes? Or is it something about predictive analytics? Are we going to train a large language model that will allow us to give better competitive insights to our customers?”

“Now, within an NGO or a not-for-profit organisation, I think it’s quite unique,” Sandhu continued. “One of the areas that I think will be really important is how we can optimise our resources.”

“So there are two areas, I think, for AI to really uplift its game and make AI work in non-profits. One is about data security, and the second is about resource optimisation. So if we could, as a charity, be able to identify in advance and predict where our staff and our people in our community are likely to need our support and personalise, wouldn’t that be great to make interventions to personalise outreach efforts? Because charities are not flush with resources, it is really important to optimise these efforts.”

In effect, Sandhu outlines that the more we can leverage technology to optimise resources, the quicker and better Sandhu and his team at charity BigLifeGroup, which aims to support vulnerable people, can reach those who need them.

“If AI, through training large language models and data, can help us identify when we need to intervene with certain people, I think that personalisation and outreach efforts will optimise our support efforts,” Sandhu elaborated. “We at BigLifeGroup want to move towards AI. That could be a chatbot on the service desk. It could be better understanding data from the NHS or particular service providers so we can make that intervention, that personalisation of our outreach. ”

Sandhu added that the organisation’s move to the cloud has helped with collaboration and supported field teams that are active in the community.

“So those field staff, if they can have access to data, a Word document, or some information about the individual in real time as they move around with their laptops, client-to-client, user-to-user, Cloud, has allowed that collaboration to happen and that communication to start to provide seamless communication, which is vital for the on-the-ground impact in the community,” Sandhu explained.

Sandhu started in the defence sector before moving into finance in his earlier career, which was “very, very heavy on the engineering and project management side”. He then went into consulting, where he worked for “a large outsourcing provider and then a big advisory consultancy in the top four”.

Sandhu’s Leadership Journey

Sandhu has extensive, decades-long experience as an IT leader, consultant, and interim/fractional CIO across several industries, including charities, higher education, finance, local government, hospitality, and legal. He emphasised that he’s helped guide organisations around the “golden thread” of aligning their IT and technology strategy with the overarching business. “This shared purpose and direction helps to motivate and inspire the tech folk,” Sandhu affirmed.

He stressed he has spent a great deal of time developing those strategies and then operationalising and delivering them to achieve business outcomes.

That emerges from his background in consultancy.

“As I moved away from consultancy, I’ve always used the tools, frameworks, and methodologies I used and developed to help IT departments align with the business,” he stated. “I’ve always wanted to bring my consulting and stakeholder experience into that CIO role, so not only am I a fractional interim CIO, but I end up as the trusted advisor in consulting work.”

Currently, Sandhu could be working with one, two, or three clients at one time. That could be a six-month contract, a 10-month longer-term contract, or just a few days here and there, helping them align their technology strategy and solve business challenges through technology solutions. Sandhu is also a partner in a boutique consultancy called Overture, a new AI-enabled digital consultancy.

“We pride ourselves on bringing the power of current technology into our offerings,” Sandhu asserted. “So, for that technology strategy business alignment piece, we use a SaaS-based technology platform called Xirocco, which allows us to develop adaptive technology strategies quicker, faster and better for the CIO and his team enabled through AI.”

“Because Gen AI effectively accelerates the development of content, information, and concepts around the challenges you have in IT, you can do the analysis quicker and better. So, I’m very passionate about leveraging technology in a meaningful way so it adds purpose and value. That’s how I approach every engagement I have with every client the same way.”

As Sandhu has progressed in his career, he’s found he’s able to switch with confidence because of his flexibility, adaptability, and experience gained through hands-on practical IT transformation implementation experience. The biggest challenge at the current stage of his career is switching context as it can be energy sapping. 

“Working in a higher education university’s culture is very different from working in a bank,” Sandhu suggested. “They probably want to be a little bit more dynamic in the organisation, where the pace of change is slower and harder to drive through. They both desire change, but the dynamism with which they approach it is very different. They also have different cost bases and financial ammunition to make the change happen. That’s about understanding the culture.”

“Because what clients really want is solutions to their problem,” Sandhu said matter-of-factly. “If I can bring my expertise to that organisation and help it change quicker, faster, and better, the value that I’m providing is immense.”

Delivering Transformation For Customers

Sandhu’s extensive experience as an agent of change often entailed compelling challenges.

“I tend to go into a lot of organisations where there’s been a real reluctance to change, but a catastrophic event has happened, which has required them to bring in somebody who can bring aboard the change expertise required and a different mindset,” Sandhu said.

“I remember when I walked into an interim role as a CIO, Head of Tech at Wakefield District Council, and the previous CIO or Head of IT had been there for 43 years. It was amazing because what I could sense as I was talking and meeting the IT department staff and the business, they just hadn’t been given permission and empowerment to change.”

“That sounds very simple, but what I ended up doing for the IT department staff was saying, ‘You can go on a training course, you can go and talk to that leader in the business to capture the requirements for a new CRM system, or you can capture the requirements,’ because they felt that the CIO had just excluded them from being able to engage with the wider business.”

“What I did there was develop the IT strategy. We ended up doing a cloud assessment. They just weren’t ready for cloud. They didn’t know what cloud was.”

Sandhu and his team brought in a Microsoft partner who performed an assessment of all of the council’s application workloads and all the business units and directorates. “It said, ‘Well, you’ve got all these workloads and these systems. Some you might need to retire some, some you might need to continue to invest in, but there is a business case and a return on investment if you shift those workloads into a cloud environment, and that could be Azure or AWS or whatever,'” Sandhu recalled.

That ended up being a major cloud transformation journey, with benefits including greater cost savings, boosted agility, and the ability to spin up environments for experiments and POCs.

Sandhu was also once the Head of Technology at London’s Excel Convention Centre, where he developed the IT strategy while maintaining BAU projects.

“What Excel wanted, and this is really a digital transformation play, was to become a smart venue,” Sandhu outlined. “That means very different things to various stakeholders. 

“So if you think of Excel, you’ve got loads of events, exhibitions and shows going on,” Sandhu said. “What they really wanted to do was create a personal experience for each visitor who can come to the Venue and download their show and app, then go and go to the show, go to a talk, then go for a meeting, a one-to-one with somebody, then go and get some lunch all enabled by a technology experience.”

However, the technology you need to enable that visitor experience has many facets. You need an app, good connectivity, and Wi-Fi. When you go into the show, you want to be directed to a booth where there are no queues.

“I was at that initial stage where we were trying to flush out the technology connectivity from 100,000 square feet to 250,000 square feet,” Sandhu remembered. “So all the hall fit-outs required structured cabling, and the access points had to provide fantastic Wi-Fi and 5G mobile connectivity. That’s just gone live.”

“I was effectively building the backbone infrastructure to move Excel to start becoming a smart venue, but I made sure that backbone infrastructure and connectivity were in place. In connectivity, the network that they had in the venue was about 10 years old, so it needed a major refresh.”

“What I did with the IT team was reach out to the market with the requirements spec saying, ‘We want to become a smart venue. We’re going to grow space and hold more exhibitions to cater to those 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 visitors that come to the venue on a daily basis. In some cases, we need that connectivity with Wi-Fi and 5G to be available all the way through the corridors.'”

Sandhu ran a tender exercise, then went through a shortlist of the major players in the market, including Cisco, HP and Rackspace. That culminated in a multi-million-pound refresh of the network infrastructure, the core and edge switches being replaced to enhance the quality of service, and the Wi-Fi in the venue through an SD-WAN solution.

Sandhu also stresses the importance of sound fundamentals in his roles or equivalent roles. New technology implementation and deployment can be exciting, but you still need to provide high-quality IT support to users.

“When I was developing the technology strategy, I always included a voice in the customer survey completed by end users of IT. I always find that users of IT will say, ‘Oh, I can’t get my laptop. It doesn’t get repaired quickly enough. Or I can’t get the bit of software I need or need my advice. Or my password reset takes ages.'”

“I’ve always had to go back to basics around IT support,” Sandhu said. “Even with my current client, we’re in the throes of implementing a brand-new service desk that will provide a better user experience. That is so important because the service desk is the front face of IT. Understanding user needs and expectations is so important. It’s not the technology or tool we’re using. It’s actually how you interact with that user to understand their problem, come up with a solution, and meet their expectations around when that solution will be deployed.”

The Seismic Impact of COVID And Hybrid Working

What was his perspective on how COVID-19 impacted the organisations he worked with—as well as the tech world at large?

It accelerated the adoption of technology,” Sandhu stressed. “I vividly remember March 2020; it was all hands to the pump effectively. ‘Can we get everybody a laptop? Because we’re all going to be working from home. Can we make sure everybody’s got a license for Microsoft Teams? Has everybody got a license for the Office 365 suite? Can everybody use Zoom?'”

“There was this operational drive for everybody to use tech, and not everybody was ready for it because people before COVID wouldn’t use Teams in some organisations, or Zoom, or chat features, but they were now, and it was being forced upon them. We’ve all had to learn how to unmute ourselves, how to bring people into a team meeting or gathering, and how to share content.”

“I think there’s always been a need to help staff with technology adoption. Training and awareness of the adoption are also really important.”

The rise of hybrid and remote working also introduced its own unique challenges, especially now many organisations are dialling back their policies.

“There’s this drive for people to get back into the office,” Sandhu said. “This ‘three days in, two days out’, or some have shifted into four days. That’s a working week these days! COVID was a great example of how we had a purpose, and we were COVID-resilient in how technology enabled that purpose. And people got on with it! It’s amazing to reflect on how purpose and vision drive people to achieve outcomes.”

“The challenge with hybrid is that if we don’t maintain that vision and purpose and don’t communicate that with our staff, who aren’t in the office all of the time, we have to put more effort into communicating via technology. It might be in small one-to-one situations or smaller team collaboration environments. But you’ve got to get them into the office and do face-to-face, half-day, one-day, periodically to have that human-to-human interaction. 

“COVID has given us a hybrid delivery model that requires more effort to keep everybody going in the right direction. That’s certainly my experience as I have moved and worked across my organisations.”

What Could (Or Should) The Future Of Tech Look Like?

While technology continues to accelerate and make work lives more productive and collaborative, there are always areas that can be improved or boosted. What technology advancements would make Sandhu’s work life easier?

“Over the past three or four years, I feel like I’ve been doing the Chief Security Officer role,” Sandhu said. “This is about ensuring we have our security tech, processes, training and cultural awareness of cybersecurity challenges in place. In theory, what keeps me up at night is a data or security breach. If some personal data or information is extracted from your network or environment, why didn’t we monitor and detect that? Was there some lateral movement we should have spotted?“

“I think it’s so important in this day and age that we’re constantly monitoring and detecting, using technology to understand the threat landscape, and assessing if somebody has been planning a brute-force attack on accounts to get into our network,” he continued. “We should always be thinking and considering how they think they are going to extract data and introduce malware into our environment so we can prevent it before it becomes a reality.”

Sandhu highlighted that getting the balance between people, processes and technology in cyberspace and keeping everybody aware of the challenges and issues is critical. “Education and awareness are as important as the tools for managing the threat. Data management, engineering and security are so important for you to do AI. If you don’t have those in place, you’re not going to be able to do AI.”

Looking ahead, what is Sandu excited about regarding the future of technology?

“I really am looking forward to thinking about communities again, protecting our data, and exploring our future advancements in automation tools so that we can streamline back-office functions,” Sandhu enthused. “If we could do more with less, like back office automation, to streamline our ways of working, we could allocate staff to more mission-critical stuff. I think if we can use AI and predictive analytics to see where those benefits could be and where we could get our return on investment, AI could be a great help.”

“I think quantum computing is becoming quite important as a trend. What does that mean for your organisation? AI is the hype at the moment, but quantum computing and back office automation: How can a robot and a human work together? How can humans and robots coexist? That’s where investment is going to be in the future.”