Hear from Lonnie Emard

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The following message was written by IT-oLogy President, Lonnie Emard.

IT-oLogy in Business Terms

Recently, I had the wonderful opportunity to share the IT-oLogy mission, strategy and operational results with a number of national foundations and private sector funders during a “speed dating” like activity in New York at Chase Manhattan Plaza.  In total, 40 non-profit organizations were there from across the country making pitches  for support of their efforts to perform some measure of “social good”.  Throughout the day, one of my original beliefs was reinforced time and time again.  All of the other organizations operating in the space of STEM education, IT skills or just technology advancement were competing to solve a particular somewhat narrow aspect of our country’s supply and demand imbalance around skills and talent.

IT-oLogy, was to my knowledge, the only organization presenting a complete model to address the skills shortage, deliver business value to companies and create econimc development advantage because of the talent.

Until a few week ago, IT-oLogy used terminology that referred to creating an entire ecosystem, an end to end solution, “from classroom to boardroom” or “from 0 to CIO”.  The idea was that we were advancing IT talent by growing the IT talent pipeline.

Since we have been running this like a business, it now makes sense to capture a true business term to describe what truly differentiates the IT-oLogy model from any other in the country.

SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT for companies that hire IT professionals.  For business partners, it clarifies why we start with k-12 education for our Promote IT initiative, then leading to the various supply chain paths that could lead to a newhire or an entrepreneurial startup, then leading to innvoation and skill development within the existing workforce and eventually the net regime of leaders.

Since there are so many varieties of partners who join IT-oLogy, this supply chain management concept makes it easier for everyone to understand where they fit because of where they receive the product (the developing individual) and who they provide the product (more skilled individual) to.

Based on feedback, I see this term supply chain management working with funders to help them connect their strategies to our proposal for creating scale and sustainability of IT-oLogy in communities and states across the country.

Your help through participation in the supply chain is the key to our success.

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