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.
