The Corporate Citizen, January 2008
Section: Features
Skill-Based Volunteerism:
Win-Win for Deloitte and College Summit
Giving of their intellectual capital, Deloitte works with multiple nonprofits to aid the organization's efficiency. College Summit is one of those organizations. '
On January 28, BCLC's Kitty Taylor interviewed team members from Deloitte and College Summit about the relationship.
Kitty Taylor, BCLC: Humby, how long have you been with Deloitte, and what is your position?
Humbelina Sanchez, Deloitte: I'm a director in Deloitte Consulting's Technology Integration practice, and have been with Deloitte for over nine years.
Kitty: Dean, please tell us a little bit about College Summit, and also about the relationship with Deloitte.
Dean Furbush, College Summit: College Summit has a mission to raise college enrollment rates in low-income communities, through the school districts, and to do so affordably.
If we can figure out how to do that affordably, then we can model it so that it can scale throughout the country. We're currently in Los Angeles, Oakland, Denver, St. Louis, South Carolina, West Virginia, the New York area, the D.C. area, and planning to expand into three or four new areas this coming year.
You asked about the Deloitte relationship. The fit is just perfect because of the size and breadth of Deloitte and in particular what we can bring each other.
The CEO of Deloitte, Barry Salzberg, has a passion around diversity and around education, and that maps into what he needs for his organization. Deloitte is one of the largest professional services organizations in the world, and being on top of the "people issues" for his organization, including thinking about recruiting college graduates in the many years to come, is a big focus for him.
From our standpoint, to have the kind of analytical and technological savvy that we get from Deloitte when they work with us is just a pure win-win.
Kitty: Humby, another question for you. What were the opportunities for collaboration with College Summit, and what were some of the initial goals for Deloitte and College Summit when the project began?
Humby: The Deloitte team has been collaborating with College Summit on how to streamline their existing data-collection process and enable a more efficient calculation of what Dean has mentioned, college enrollment metrics.
And together, through that process, we saw the need for a more robust technology solution that will not only measure and report upon the college enrollment metrics, but also enable the analysis of what indicators and levers encourage more students to go to college so that they in turn use that analysis to improve their programs.
Kitty: Jo, this one is for you. I understand that you and Humby are the liaisons for each of your organizations and you work together on a regular basis. Tell us about your experience working with Humby and with Deloitte. What impact has your work with Deloitte and Humby had on College Summit?
Jo Smith, College Summit: It's been a fabulous opportunity. Humby and the team -- they're highly skilled professionals and are experts in this field. We could not have done this kind of project any other way without this collaboration.
In terms of impact, it has many impacts besides the obvious of being able to produce this kind of solution. Professional development for my team comes to mind. Keeping IT resources in a nonprofit environment is tricky. This has helped the team keep their skills up to date.
I have a very small team and there's a lot to accomplish at College Summit. Having access to such experts and skills, it's allowed us to not only focus on the data warehouse, but also to continue working on other things. Deloitte provided me with that bandwidth.
From a mission perspective, the analysis team in particular can now spend a lot more time on the analysis and recommendations and decision making.
We continue to improve our services. I'll give you an example.
One report used to take about four hours to put together, and that particular report we can now produce in seconds. So when you look at that across the whole project, it really is a massive transformation for efficiency within the group.
Biggest of all, we're now able to put meaningful, actionable data in the hands of teachers, and the data warehouse allows us to do that in a very visual way. It allows us to show our partners -- not tell -- what's so compelling about a program.
Kitty: Humby, would you tell me more about the technology solution, the data warehouse, that you, the Deloitte team, and College Summit have come up with.
Humby: The warehouse basically takes inputs from multiple data sources and computes college enrollment metrics.
What it does that College Summit was not able to do before is streamline the data collection process and enable better reporting from a visual perspective.
It enables better analysis because they are now able to produce some reports they were not able to produce before, and that will help them improve upon the programs.
Collaboration is a great word to use for Deloitte and College Summit. We have collaborated throughout the implementation and Deloitte has assigned several dedicated resources to work on the project full time, and we also have access to additional technology subject matter experts as needed.
College Summit, in turn, provided not just technology subject matter expertise, but business subject matter expertise throughout the implementation life cycle.
They were the ones that evaluated all the vendor options that we put forward to them, and they actually chose the vendors that we're using to build the solution. They thoroughly validated all the requirements in the design and right now are actively involved in user acceptance testing and data analysis.
Throughout this process, we've been working as one team.
Kitty: What is your day to day workload like when you're with College Summit?
Humby: There is a full time team on the ground, so depending on the phase of the cycle, I may be more involved on a day to day basis in some phases of the life cycle versus others.
Kitty: This question is for all three of you. Do you have a few lessons learned through this process that you would like to share? Jo and Dean, about working with business volunteers? Humby, about working with the nonprofit sector?
Dean: At the beginning of a relationship like this, there's a lot of good will and everybody is excited about the mission.
It's important to lock in expectations up front and definitions of who's going to be doing what for whom and when. You're treating the relationship not as something that you do only halfway because it's pro bono or a donation. It's not helpful to anyone to treat it that way.
We hold each other to accountability standards that are the same if we were writing a check for it, and that's respectful of Deloitte and it's respectful of College Summit.
That's what we strive for in the relationship.
Humby: The lessons I have are really lessons that I would have in any system implementation project.
With any system implementation project, spending time up front with requirements and design and really making sure that you have a very good testing plan in place will help streamline the process. Very good project management is a critical success factor.
Jo: I would concur with what Humby said. I don't feel like it's been any different running this project than a project with a paid vendor.
So for the same reason, lessons learned would really just be about how we run the project and the things we could have done differently for success.
Kitty: Humby, how much time do you have left with College Summit in this particular engagement?
Humby: Deloitte has a commitment, at least for the data warehouse, to host the solution through 2009, and I expect to be involved at least through that time.
Kitty: In terms of where the team is with the goals that have been set out, what do you need to accomplish before the end of 2009?
Humby: Today, using the current process and technology, it takes College Summit a long time and it's unfortunately cumbersome to produce reports that show college enrollment metrics.
They are also right now unable to easily analyze what indicators and levers encourage more students to go to college.
It is my hope that upon implementation of the warehouse that they spend less time producing, but create more accurate, data rich reports, freeing up their precious time and their precious resources to spend more in analyzing the reports, to continue to improve their programs.
Obviously my ultimate goal is for this warehouse to contribute to improving the program and increasing college enrollment rates from low-income families.
Dean: I'd like to make the data more tangible to readers who don't necessarily spend all their time getting excited about data or technology.
What this translates into is what we did recently in Denver. We were able to sit down with the education leadership in that city and show them results of college enrollment rates in the Denver public school system, comparing it to public school systems around the country.
We were able to go a little deeper and say why these results were showing up in terms of kids this year and what they were doing with the parts of their college applications.
When you can sit down with a principal or with a superintendent and go over data like that, then those data can show up inside the school. What you're talking about is data having an actual effect on people's lives.
The fact that Deloitte can help us with that is a very tangible, personal outcome from the technology and data support that they're providing.
Jo: This means that we can use our intelligent people in those analysis teams to really then figure out the drivers for our own success and for increasing the enrollment rate.
The technology we've used has allowed us to improve data integrity and also ensure that all that confidential, private student information is encrypted and it's used in very strict compliance with family educational rights and privacy regulations. That's very important to the schools that we work with.
Kitty: Dean and Jo, how will you sustain what has been implemented by the Deloitte team, build off of what has been done?
Jo: We are able to do that immediately because the support from a transition perspective from Deloitte has been absolutely exceptional. We have all the documentation necessary.
We've been highly trained by all the professionals at Deloitte, so we now have a tremendous amount of knowledge in house at College Summit about the solution itself.
We learned a lot also about how to execute this kind of project successfully. Obviously, we'd never done anything like this at College Summit before, and it's very complicated. We learned a lot by participating, and we can now build and do that again as we continue to enhance the data warehouse.
My job is to provide tools to College Summit that ultimately make us successful. The data warehouse is a critical component of that IT architecture, so it will be the basis for important decision making on how we deliver our service and how we continue to improve and influence enrollment overall and helps us to achieve our mission.
Kitty: What advice do you have for other professionals and organizations interested in this type of relationship?
Humby: I never really approached this as doing business with the nonprofit sector, in the pure sense of the word. I treated it like I would have treated any of my other clients, from a system implementation perspective.
Something I continue to admire College Summit for is that I'm just thoroughly impressed with the intellect, the resourcefulness, the teamwork and the energy of the College Summit staff and leadership. Expect to have that sense of leadership in nonprofit world as well.
Dean: Treat each other with the same respect you would if it were not a pro bono situation.
When you were asking Jo and Humby about lessons learned from this project, they were describing the elements of a good software development life cycle, good project planning, – in any circumstances.
There's no reason not to bring the same level of intensity and professionalism to something that might be thought of as "doing good."
Jo: What we've produced will be transformational for our organization. I know a lot about nonprofits in D.C. and I know we are very fortunate to have this kind of relationship, and I think it's quite unique.
My wish is that this kind of expertise – and this kind of relationship – is modeled with other non-profits.
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Kitty Taylor, BCLC
Sr. Communications Manager
Humbelina Sanchez, Director in Deloitte Consulting's Technology Integration practice and a volunteer with College Summit
Dean Furbush, President of College Summit
Jo Smith, Vice President of Technology for College Summit
(photo not available)
