Introduction
Information technology is no longer merely an important accessory for entrepreneurs as it has now risen to become an invaluable and indispensable tool for any modern organization. The value and worth of IT increases exponentially for organizations that operate under inordinately complicated internal and external environments (Aras & Crowther, 2016; Keyes, 2016). When looking at from a business perspective, the Salvation Army can only be considered as operating in one of the most complicated internal and external environments. The Salvation Army is both a functional church, a functional business entity and finally, a recognized charitable organization all rolled up into one and operating on a near-global scale (Taylor, 2014). For a start, due to the organization's faith, the organization holds itself to a higher moral and ethical standard than most businesses (Salvation Army, 2019). Secondly, the organization also accepts donations from members of the public, hence exposing itself to a higher level of scrutiny on how it utilizes those funds. Finally, due to the nature of the organization, its activities are extremely localized and expanded to include thousands of locations and little entities all superintended by the same central office. As this research paper will reveal, the combination of the business strategy and IT strategy at the Salvation Army present an impossible outcome but due to the human component of the organization, it continues to not only survive but also thrive.
Background Information: The Business Strategy
The complications created by the complex nature of the Salvation Army and an enterprise is the primary bearing factor to the complicated nature of the organization’s IT strategy. The business strategy of the organization can be concisely defined as combining donations with profits to increase capacity to assist the less fortunate. For a start, the organization does not seek profits to expand or make money but rather to assist those who are in need, in line with its beliefs regarding charity (Salvation Army, 2019). Secondly, most organizations consider profits as their only source of income and the primary source of income (Aras & Crowther, 2016). For the Salvation Army, its donations through, inter alia, its red kettle programs. The red kettle programs include actual kettles placed in street corners and virtual online kettles, which combined raise tens of millions of dollars annually (Taylor, 2014). The income from charity is supplemented by business entities such as Thrift stores and charity shops. The said stores and shops also have a charity perspective as most of the goods sold therein come from donations.
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It is easy for anyone evaluating the business strategy of the Salvation Army to assume that it is too complicated for exponential growth. However, as available statistics reveal, the operations being run by the instant organization are massive. According to Fieldstadt (2015), in the year 2014, over one hundred and forty million US dollars was raised through over 25,000 actual red kettles alongside almost twenty-five million US dollars that were raised from online kettles. Conversely, 4.5 million families made up of almost thirty million people were assisted by a combination of three million volunteers combined with over sixty thousand employees. An important aspect of the organizations business strategy is that 82% of all income that has come directly from donations is expressly used for charity programs (Taylor, 2014). The strategy leaves only 18% of the income for running the massive organization which normally leads to extremely thrifty behavior.
Information Technology Strategy
A combination of being extremely elaborate in operations on the one hand and being extremely thrifty on the other makes for a very complicated IT strategy for the Salvation Army. Indeed, the IT strategy is dominated by three critical but almost contrasting factors. The first lies in the massive nature of the operations of the organization including the millions of people working as volunteers and the tens of millions who benefit from the program (Taylor, 2014). Secondly, the activities of the organization vary exponentially from one another as reflected by the business strategy. With thousands of branches spread all over the world, there is a jumbled combination of completely localized activities, regional activities, national activities, and global activities (Taylor, 2014). The multilevel nature also affects the IT strategy. Finally and perhaps most importantly, the organization is by its very nature extremely thrifty when it comes to its internal expenses. The organization’s business strategy ensures that up to 82% goes directly to charity work. The remaining 18% has to be shared between recurring expenses, fundraising expenses and administrative expenses where IT expenses fall.
IT Strategic Planning
With there being so much need for IT-based activities and so limited resources, the IT strategy for the Salvation Army can only be defined as seeking to make do! In seeking to make do, the organizations IT department seeks to combine innovativeness, improvisation, and creativity to ensure that the limited budget that it goes a long way as it can to ensure that the organization’s business strategy is effective (Hickey, 2017). In most cases, expenses are only made if they must be made. Further, there is generally no global, regional or national IT strategy because the IT infrastructure is primarily localized. Each segment of the organization handles its own needs according to its resources and needs. For example, in the Salvation Army run hospitals, minimum IT requirements have been set by statute and have thus to be met at all costs as a regulatory requirement. Such institutions have localized sound IT strategies. Other centers, more so the rural ones have haphazard and simple IT strategies designed purely on a make do basis (Hickey, 2017). Between the extremely formal and informal aspects of the IT strategy as defined above is the several innovative strategies applied by the different segments of the organization.
Performance Gaps
Among the primary areas of focus for the Salvation Army, IT strategy is seeking to fill the performance gaps that keep on arising through the limited resources available. In IT, performance gaps can be defined as the difference between the available IT technological capabilities and IT needs within an organization (Keyes, 2016). Such gaps can include issues such as performance, storage, security, interoperability and ease of usage. An IT performance gap analysis for the Salvation Army yield very interesting results. The organization predated modern computer-based IT and had learned to function effectively without computers. When the computer came along, simple performance gaps such as the need for word processing were met through a limited investment in computers. As IT continued to take over different aspects of life and commerce, performance gaps continued to grow. As per the IT strategy above, the limited resources caused performance gaps to grow faster than the organization to adjust to them. At any moment in time, the Salvation Army’s IT department is always playing a combination of catch-up by updating the areas that it must or make-do by trying to overcome the performance gaps that are too expensive to fix (Hickey, 2017).
Opportunities for the use of Current Technology Solution
The limited budget available for the Salvation Army to fill its performance gaps has ensured that the organization only makes limited investments to take advantage of the technology that is currently available to fill its performance gaps. Any IT expert who would be exposed to the elaborate and expansive activities that happen at the organization would easily recommend cloud storage combined with artificial intelligence to enable the sorting and accessibility of data including interoperability where necessary. Available research shows that the Salvation Army’s CIO also had the same impression as the organizations US headquarters employs cloud computing for data storage (Hickey, 2017). Unfortunately, due to cost implications, the implantation of cloud computing has only been done in limited areas within the organization. In the USA for example, the organization is divided into a large number of segments each of which has been given IT strategy autonomy. All these segments need cloud computing, but only those who can afford it have implemented it. The others are still using seemingly archaic data saving approaching such as high capacity hard drives (Hickey, 2017)! Another form of technology that has been utilized to meet performance gaps at the organization is mobile technology. Mobile phones and other devices have been an important respite for the lack of a functional intranet within the organization. However, the improvisation necessary for using mobile technology as an organizational tool without a functional intranet has fundamentally compromised the security of most systems.
Governance Models
Despite the complicated nature of the Salvation Army as outlined above, the organization has been able to survive an even thrive due to the Patron Governance Model. The patron governance model is said to happen when the management team has a massive influence over the organization to the extent that their instructions can be followed without the need for close superintendence. Discipline is an integral part of the Salvation Army which is closely framed after a military, complete with uniforms and military titles (Taylor, 2014). Almost all the employees and volunteers in the organization are members of the church and the leaders of the organization also happen to be major leaders of the church. Management is extremely expensive as managers have to put monitoring and evaluation measures in place to ensure that their instructions are followed. Indeed, as Leblanc (2012) puts, the checks and balances in the Salvation Army are so limited since monitoring resources are scarce. However, most Salvation Army followers accept instructions readily and seek to follow them as part of their faith commitment; hence the monumental success of the organization (Taylor, 2014).
IT Architecture and Digital Strategies
Unfortunately, the advantage that the Salvation Army has in its governance model does not extend to its IT infrastructure which can only be defined as an Achilles heel. IT infrastructure relates to a combination of the various components of an organizations IT system and also how those components have been put together to form a singular entity (Keyes, 2016). It can be equated to a normal architecture where building materials are brought together to create a building. In IT, software and hardware are the building materials while the IT strategy determines how they are brought together to create an IT system. The loose and decentralized IT strategy in the organization has resulted in each segment of the organization developing its own IT solutions to meet their perceived IT needs based on their available budgets (Hickey, 2017). The outcome is an exponentially complicated ally of different systems all working under the same umbrella organization. It would be a monumental feat to create any singular substantive system out of the jumbled collection that is the current organization’s IT system or rather sets of systems. The organization has thus come up with a very innovative digital strategy that allows all constituent system administrators to find localized solutions for their localized problems (Hickey, 2017). The more the strategy is implemented, the harder it becomes to create a unified IT system at the Salvation Army.
Conclusion
The totality of the above can be considered as a textbook example of exactly how not to run a business both in terms of a business strategy and an IT strategy, yet the Salvation Army has continued to thrive using the very same set of strategies. The Salvation Army has a business strategy that is predicated on charity and an IT strategy that is predicated on improvisation. The business strategy leaves only 18% of income for running the company which is so limited that it seems preposterous when compared to the massive scale of activities in the organization. Conversely, the organization has a delocalized IT strategy that allows all its branches to make do with what they can. Instead of the strategies above resulting in disaster, they have resulted in a thriving enterprise purely because of the inordinate influence that the leadership has on its followers. The success of the Salvation Army is thus an enigma that needs to be studied further to present nuggets of wisdom about leadership and management.
References
Aras, G., & Crowther, D. (2016). The Durable Corporation: Strategies for Sustainable Development . Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press.
Fieldstadt, E. (2015, December 24). Salvation Army Red Kettles by the Numbers. Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/season-of-kindness/salvation-army-red-kettles-numbers-n472246
Hickey, A. (2017, December 22). How the Salvation Army is upgrading its storage technology. Retrieved from https://www.ciodive.com/news/how-the-salvation-army-is-upgrading-its-storage-technology/513680/
Keyes, J. (2016). Implementing the IT Balanced Scorecard: Aligning IT with Corporate Strategy . Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press.
Leblanc, R. (2012). Governance at the Salvation Army. Retrieved from http://boardexpert.com/governance-at-the-salvation-army/
Salvation Army. (2019). Business as Mission. Retrieved from https://www.salvationarmy.org/ihq/323EAF3DAB1D407280256F1D0077EC1E
Taylor, D. W. (2014). Like a Mighty Army?: The Salvation Army, the Church, and the Churches . Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers.
