Chief Information Officer and National Director of Information and Technology at the Girl Scouts of the USA Marcia Balestrino has lots of interests. When she was in high school, she wanted to be a nurse. When she entered college, she moved on to chemistry. Four years later Balestrino left Youngstown State University with a degree in math and a penchant for programming.
The programming stuck, and she spent most of the 1970s programming and the better part of the '80s and '90s managing and directing IT projects and departments.
In 1998 Balestrino segued into a CIO role that has let her indulge her technical interests and show off her managerial skill while doing the one thing she never outgrew - wanting to help people.
Current Challenges
CIO: You became the CIO of the Girl Scouts in 1998, after spending 10 years in financial IT and 13 years in IT at health-care companies. How does the CIO role differ in a nonprofit?
Balestrino: The CIO role works the same way in a nonprofit. You still need to apply good technology. You still need to manage the process well. You still need to understand what your business objectives are, and you still need to manage the people. It's just the organisation's mission that is different. And that mission, that purpose to what I'm doing, is very important to me.
At the Girl Scouts, there are 2.8 million girls out there who are somehow impacted by what I do, and if I can do it really well, I'll help them enjoy being a Girl Scout even more. It's a couple layers removed, but I always keep that end in mind.
When I worked in health care, seeing the patients and knowing that there was something I could do to help them get better or feel better kind of kept me going.
Even at American Express - where I was before the Girl Scouts - I had a mission. I worked in the travel division and helped customers get places to do things and get out of jams. When there are earthquakes and floods and people are in foreign countries, American Express takes great pride in volunteering its resources and helping people out. That drew me to that organisation.
I've always been involved in nonprofits some way or another, doing volunteer work. Working for one brings it all together.
What are your core responsibilities at the Girl Scouts?
I am responsible for all the technology at the national organisation, which has about 550 employees. We cover all of the typical systems, the business systems, and the finance.
The Girl Scouts has more than 300 councils that are independent organisations, chartered by the national organisation. I provide a level of technology support for the councils. Right now we provide a couple of technology packages: a membership system that the councils use, and a system that they use for registering girls for camp.
Do you have to pinch pennies being at a nonprofit?
In general, funding is not an issue. Technology is a high - priority item for the organisation, because there is an understanding that we can be more efficient and effective in using technology. We also have to make sure our customers - our girls, our main customers who we are here for - have a future that is technology rich.
We do have a budget that we have to live in, so maybe we can't do all we want in one year, but that's common to all organisations.
What kind of projects do you work on?
For the first year and a half that I was here, the major focus was to get all of the systems ready to do the Y2K transition, which we did extremely successfully. We replaced our three major systems and upgraded some others. It was a massive effort.
We are now in the process of replacing one of those systems that we replaced. Unfortunately some of those Y2K compliant systems didn't meet what our real needs were.
We recently bought a merchandising system that will add a lot more functionality and give us better inventory management.
What keeps you up at night?
Thinking about all I need to do and want to accomplish. Our goal is to help the girls become leaders in the future and help them grow strong and be productive adults and have a lot of fun along the way. So anything I can do to help that process, even though we're a couple levels removed, I want to do.
I get my energy from when I get to see the girls in action. I was in Texas last week [at the time of this interview] and the council there has a program where they are teaching the girls to use computers to create business cards to help them in the cookie sales. To see the girls learning how to use my tool to accomplish something is really energising.
How I Got Here
You received a bachelor's of science in math and started in IT right away. Did the degree give you leverage?
Yes, in the sense that I fell into my career field and didn't have to struggle with finding out what I wanted to do in life.
I started out in technology. My first job was in 1970 as an assembler programmer at a utility company programming on a HR system. And I stayed with it. I did years of programming - tech support, system programming, being responsible for the operating systems and databases at a number of hospitals.
Was it hard to be a female programmer in the 1970s? Did the male techies treat you differently?
When I began as a programmer, the field was relatively new and men and women were all learning together what it meant to be in technology. I never felt like I was being treated any differently as a programmer. I was also in a very technical area - assembler/BAL programming - so skills, knowledge, and the ability to get the program to run were much more important than whether you were male or female.
Throughout your career, what was the most onerous project you worked on that you learned the most from?
When I was at American Express, I worked on a project to replace all the card-processing systems we had around the company. It was one of the largest projects I'd ever undertaken.
I co-managed it with another director and an associate partner at Andersen Consulting [now Accenture]. The three of us grew the organisation from about 30 people to 150 people in less than a year. Learning to work with the other two co-leaders was probably one of my best experiences. All three of us came into our roles thinking we were going to be the leader and then all of a sudden, we found out that we weren't going to be the only leader. We struggled through that and ended up having a great working relationship.
I learned what real honest-to-goodness teamwork means, and how to trust people entirely.
What was the biggest mistake you made?
This was also at American Express. I had a working relationship that wasn't really good with one of my peers, and I never got it resolved. It remained an issue until she retired. We only worked directly together for a little over two years, but it even carried forward when I changed positions and went to other departments.
Problems like this don't really go away. As long as you stay in the same organisation, it will continue to follow you.
When you started out, was there anything you thought was incredibly important that turned out to be not important at all?
Technology is critical to the success of the project, but it's not the end-all, be-all. So much is important that you need to look at each project individually, bring in experience and then balance all the variables.
What were you forced to learn on the job that you did not expect to have to learn?
When I came out of college, I thought I was going to be a technician all of my life. I was good at it and was challenged by it. But when I became a manager I learned the organisational politics and how important that is to what you are doing. And that was more challenging, I found.
If you could change something you did early in your career, what would it be?
I would have worked for three or four years at a professional consultancy like Andersen Consulting [now Accenture], to get a different perspective and polish.
Those companies immerse you in working with different levels of people real quick, something that took me longer to learn. Working there would have given me the opportunity to work with multiple companies and get a broader perspective on different ways of doing things. In a three to four year period of time, I might have worked at two or three different companies and learned several different right ways to do things.
Learning About Management
How did you work into management?
In the late '70s I was working at a large hospital system in Ohio and was promoted from a programmer to a programming manager.
After starting that I went back for my MBA part-time, at night. I realised that even if I stayed technical, like I wanted to, I had to also understand the business aspects.
Was the move into management natural?
It was a struggle. I ended up managing people that I had been peers with just before I got promoted. I think that was one of the biggest challenges - learning to be the manager instead of the friend. Things I could say to them the day before, I really couldn't say anymore. I was managing them and thinking about the business.
What best prepared you to be a CIO?
Seven of the 10 years I spent at American Express were in the technology organisation, and three were in the marketing organisation, where I became the business owner of some technology systems. While in marketing I became the customer of my former staff and the products I had managed. That gave me a very new, different perspective on what we do for technology. I saw what technology does, what the output is, what the outcome is and how it feels to be the customer of a technology organisation. That was probably one of the best learning experiences I've had along the way and one of the best that I think positioned me to understand the CIO role.
What qualities must all CIO's possess to be effective?
I think a good CIO has to have good communication skills and understand the business that she is in. A good CIO has to be able to select good qualified people and then let them do their jobs. Sometimes I think the ability to remain calm in the storm, in the middle of a crisis, is real important to balance out with the sense of urgency. Somehow impress on the team that there is a sense of urgency, but not allow them to move into crisis mode. A CIO also has to have a sense of humour. We can't do this in a sterile environment.
What's the single biggest lesson you'd pass on to a new CIO?
People, even non-technologists, tend to say, "I want this system" or "I want this tool." They want the hammer, but they haven't decided what they really have are screws that they want to put into the wall; they've just found a hammer that is kind of cool. So the first thing a CIO will do is help the organisation figure out what its objective is and then match the technology.
Do you have any advice for someone who wants to work in IT for a nonprofit?
They should know that large nonprofits are functioning more like businesses nowadays. I think I was hired because of my business experience. Think about how you apply your business knowledge and how your business expertise and technology tool pertain to the mission of the organisation. Understanding the mission of the organisation, the purpose of the nonprofit is important. You could do some volunteer work to better understand that non-profits mission.
Understand that in a nonprofit all decisions aren't made in a dollars-and-cents manner. There are a lot of qualitative issues that come into play in a nonprofit that may not come into play in a for-profit.
The Technology End
Do you maintain a basic understanding of the languages your employees use?
Yes. I have a very high level of understanding. Could I sit down and do the programming? I'd like to think I could, but not without a lot of learning.
Do you ever feel the need to explain to your staff that you have done this kind of work in the past and you do understand it?
When I was first hired I felt like I had to let them know that. I had to give them some information about my background and what my experience was.
I think a CIO needs to have an understanding of what their staff is doing because it gives you credibility with your staff. I don't think I need to be able to program anymore. My responsibility is to hire good directors; help them hire good staff and then help them do their job. If I really knew how to do it, I might get my hands on it and that would not allow them to do their job.
If I was in a much smaller organisation, that would be different, but here I have directors who have the responsibility for managing the hands-on technical aspect.
What have you learned about technology?
There is no technology silver bullet. Regardless of the hype surrounding them, new technologies only become additions to our toolbox and rarely replace what we already have. As a CIO, it is important to determine the right technology solution for the issue and not try to make the latest and greatest technology fit every concern.
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