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Smartdesc Charity Technology Leaders Report 2024: Key themes and calls to action

From January to March 2024, CFG partner and charity IT specialists Smartdesc conducted its annual survey of charity technology leaders to understand the sector’s priorities, risks, challenges, and opportunities around IT.

The report summarizes the key findings, draws out the main themes and trends, and compares how things have changed since the 2023 survey. Here are the key themes and calls to action for charity IT leaders:

The AI Era: A big theme to emerge this year is, unsurprisingly, Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a ten-fold increase in those either considering or trailing it.

Large language models (LLMs) and tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot have driven a sharp rise in the number of charities now looking very seriously at how this rapidly evolving technology could affect, benefit and present risks to them.

Some charities have already jumped in, and while this is still a small percentage, the survey results indicate this will grow significantly throughout the year.

The need to accelerate existing strategies: With AI technology having moved on so rapidly, IT leaders have identified the need to accelerate infrastructure, security, and data strategies to ensure IT environments are ready to safely and efficiently gain maximum value from AI tools.

Resourcing: Reactive issues taking IT staff away from projects or improvements was the biggest challenge IT leaders reported, with many now looking at hybrid in-house & outsourced (“co-managed”) models to elevate internal IT resources to more mission-focused projects.

Securing: Cybers Security has risen even higher up the priority list compared to last year, probably driven by the rise of AI, with even fewer respondents feeling they are well positioned to respond to an attack should it happen. This further highlights the need for more active cyber security awareness training and testing of staff, as well as hardening of more traditional controls, with many going deeper into the Microsoft Defender suite to achieve a better security posture.

Governing: Charity leaders are aspiring to raise IT's profile and obtain strategic investment in technology at Board level whilst at the same time looking at ways to re-centralise procurement of cloud apps that have increasingly been procured outside of traditional IT processes.

Optimising: Maximising existing toolsets, improving operational efficiency, and digitisation are still right near the top of the priority list. Several opportunities still exist to make fuller use of the Microsoft stack by consolidating down 3rd party vendors into Microsoft functionality that is already included in most licenses, just not leveraged.

In conclusion, the year ahead promises a wealth of opportunity for technology teams. The charities that can unlock the opportunity that AI presents will achieve the greatest productivity gains. The role of technology teams has never been more important.

Read the full report

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