Matching tech to degrees of scale at the Salvation Army

The Salvation Army is a household name but beyond the iconic red shield logo is a vast network of retail stores, social programs, churches, and community services. Milad Kruze, executive GM for IT and also a CIO50 alum, is still learning about the scale of offerings nearly three years into the role, which is understandable considering the Salvation Army operates in about 140 countries worldwide and is Australia’s largest non-profit.

“We help people every 17 seconds across our social programs, ranging from homelessness and housing support through to domestic violence, aged care, disaster relief, youth services, and a wide range of community services such as financial counseling,” he says. “We’re in that multi-sectored environment where we run at different speeds, so it makes things very interesting for the IT department. What we do is essentially own the technology backbone for the entire organization and bring all those different things together.”

In terms of the overall digital journey, how the Salvation Army uses many forms of technology across its services and within the enterprise to meet myriad needs is always a work in progress — especially considering, as Kruze puts it, that the Salvation Army effectively operates as a 140-year-old startup from a tech perspective. Being that old, one of the biggest challenges is putting new tech into play within the sheer size of the organization, trying to connect things together. The technology for retail, for example, is different to housing, and homelessness is very different to churches, so coming up with approaches in meeting those unique needs is always intricate work. But something as simple as a contact center initiative and reducing cognitive load for staff have been real unifiers. The vast legions of volunteers who pull considerable weight are also very helpful.

“We have very strong and great leadership, but we also have 20,000 volunteers across the Salvation Army, and we need them at different places and at the same time as well,” he says. “It’s that digital backbone we built early on that allows us to bring in tools and software, and connect them into our ecosystem. This year, we’re particularly focused on a blended workforce with our volunteers, and how we can give them more access to our environment to be part of the Salvation Army technical environment.”

And considering the broad range of work in a multitude of demographics and age groups, language and cultural barriers persist. But that’s where AI comes into play.

“We’ve been using AI technology a lot in that space and figuring out how to have language translation and reduce cognitive load, but increase psychological safety,” Kruze says. “AI is simplifying that so much more so we can connect with empathy. And then we’ve got a whole range of networking and data center projects, as well as heavy lifting infrastructure type stuff that we’ve needed to connect the organization to that digital backbone.”

Kruze also discussed strategies to ensure tech buy in from non-tech stakeholders, and the importance of relationship building and diversity in IT. Watch the full video below for more insights.                                                     

On aligning the IT strategy with the overall mission: When you’re aligning strategy with mission and values, you’ve got to understand what we do first. I spent a lot of my first year seeing different sites and how we do things. And once you’re on site, you understand how much of a positive community impact we can make on a shoestring budget and what the local challenges are. We started our strategy in that way, using human centered design (HCD) thinking methodologies, but it was really around hearing the stories from our front line and our missional areas and what they do every day. It’s amazing to see the broad set of things they do and the people they help: small business owners, community members, the homeless, and so on. So we really need to be able to connect in that way. And we came up with an organizational digital strategy to provide a North Star for the entirety of the organization, where we needed to move to. The three key themes or focus areas are, first, capability excellence and building that digital muscle for the organization to get those basics right across the board; second is around empowering our frontline, which is the heartbeat of our organization and what we do, and we need to be able to provide people with the right tools and services to achieve their best; and third is around how we connect with communities across Australia, working with all demographics and age groups. So how connected we are to the mission and values of The Salvation Army is reflected in the direct connections into communities.

On non-technical stakeholder alliances: It all comes back to relationships and partnerships. What we do and how we connect with community is very much how we are internally. We’re a highly relational organization, but I’d say the simple answer is we understand what people go through. I went to a site recently to meet with the core officer and understand how they work and what their challenges are. And they were telling me this story about how they helped someone get off a park bench, get cleaned up and fed. They then sat down with him and talked about what help or services were needed, and process what they needed to do as part of their day job. If you understand that context you need to work within, and what they go through, you start speaking the same language. And once you start speaking the same language, it really gives you a good baseline of things to talk about, and understand the things required to make solutions work. As soon as you start talking about the value of that in terms of workload, everyone gets on board pretty quickly. I see that as the CIO role, just as much as the IT department’s to be able to have those conversations and really understand what we do and treat it from an empathetic point of view.

On cybersecurity: We’ve just completed our three year cyber strategy and ae now refreshing our new one. For us, it’s really about balance as well. We can turn everything on and lock everyone out of everything, just to say we’re safe. But we’re custodians of sensitive information and regulations, so we need to meet those needs, particularly within our employment services space, holding public information. And we’ve taken a three tiered approach consisting of people, process, and tech, and we knew we needed to start with people. We’ve done a lot of work in the last year just around cyber awareness and cyber maturity. We also run phishing campaigns every month and see those statistics. We used to be in the double digits when we first started as to who clicked on these emails and provided passwords, and now we’re in single digits. So from a cyber awareness point of view, and where we are in total as an organization, we’ve come a long way. From a processors view, we’re always testing and running incident response tests, penetration tests, and social engineering tests. Just last year, we impersonated a VIP calling our service desk wanting to reset passwords. It’s amazing by how much you learn from those different environments. It’s rapidly changing but we’re not doing anything too exciting. For us just to remain at a status quo takes a lot of work. We’re just trying to keep safe. From a technology perspective, we have some advanced technologies in place and great partners around our threat intelligence. So we’re in a place where it’s about fine tuning and figuring out which dials to turn. This is in lockstep with the board as well as our audit risk committee and executives.

On the best use for AI: We’re setting up our AI practice formally for the first time, so it’s a new capability and really exciting for us. Last year, we were trying to figure out what it was. We’ve got some tools we’re releasing, like a virtual buddy tool for everyone within the Salvation Army, and looking into more around productivity. What’s really interesting is we’re using AI for that psychological safety and cognitive load as well. It’s easy to use it for productivity sake, but when you start looking at work, health, and safety and how to apply it to those human needs, it gets quite interesting. We’re continuing down that road and looking at the role of IT and digital across the board. We continue providing value and playing in that front of office space to drive a lot of tech outcomes. Leaders across the board are working closely with the IT department, and we’re trying to navigate what those things look like in terms of governance and investing in the right things at the right time. So our role is shifting again. From a sustainability point of view, I always ask myself, how do I not burn people out, including myself, because of such a fast pace. If we can continue with a great culture and continue to have fun and be connected to our mission and what we do, it goes a long way. We want to be consistently intentional about those things, and how we connect the mission of the Salvation Army. Ultimately, that’s the fuel that drives us.