ChMS: How Big is the Circle?

When you say "Church Management," what all do you include?  Traditionally, ChMS has focused on congregational management - people, groups, events, attendance, contributions, and so forth.  More recently, the term has sometimes included Content Management and web extensions, maybe facilities management, and more and more aspects of managing the business operations of the church.  There's even been some discussion that the ChMS should help manage the vision of the church.  These are certainly all needs.  Should they all be part of a centralized ChMS?  Here's my more important question of the day: Should all these different functions be connected?

Whitney put together a graphic (below) to show a bit of how disconnected our current systems are.  This document is affectionaly known as the "bubble diagram."  What we'd like to do is pull more and more "into the circle."  That doesn't mean systems have to all be from one vendor, but we want to have common data, and from the user's perspective, we want one integrated system.  A big wish.  Do you think there's any hope?

By the way, we know the above isn't a complete picture -- the list of systems is much larger!

Comments

[Jim Walton]

I have been pondering lately what ChMS really entails, it seems that different vendors provide a wide variety of functionality.

Maybe it needs to evolve into subsets, like ChMS.events, ChMS.people, ChMS.facilities and each subset is an area of managing the church. Maybe not, just a thought.

Whitney did a good job of detailing many of your systems.

[KevMc]

I agree with Jim that subsets need to exist. I don't believe any ChMS company has a strategy to properly relate those subsets.

I think there is hope Tony.

[Newsaddikt]

I'd say 'manage' would be too strong of a word to use w/ ChMS. The lead Pastor & ministry team should manage the vision.

The ChMS should help facilitate that vision. ChMS is just a tool to use to accomplish the vision - along w/ staff, volunteers, congregation, & even the facility itself.