Six Things I'd Like to be Involved With

(for the grammar police: "yes, I know")

As I'm looking at employment options, six different things keep "showing up," professionally, at least in my mind. 

1. IT Tools for churches of all sizes
(previous post)  Inventory, license management, intranet, knowledgebase, helpdesk, group task management, and on and on

2. Church IT Best Practices
Talked about often.  Where are any documented?  (David Drinnon has at least started this process)

3. Project/Task management tool that works for church staff
MS-Project is NOT the answer.  What's a tool, or set of tools, that would work for people who don't really understand all the complications of Project Management?  Can normal people manage big projects without being project managers?

4. Find a good solution for document/data storage & management, including search solution
(previous post) Storage sprawl is only part of the problem.  Backups, Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery are other pieces.  But what about the more basic data cleanup -- getting old/unused stuff out of the way, then giving people a good way to find the stuff they need?

5. ChMS needs for the top 100 largest churches
(100 may not be the right number, but it's a stab) (a related, really old post) What an improvement there has been in the past few years, but there's still a big gap.  What if one of the ChMS vendors (or several together?) were to focus on just the really big churches?  Would we all benefit?

6. Taking the "next step" with CITRT
So many great things have happened since that first fall, 2006, roundtable at Granger.  Still, hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who should be connected have never heard of CITRT.  Plus, we still can't answer the simple question "how many members does your organization have?"  Can we keep the benefits of our un-group, yet ever-so-slightly formalize it (like a membership database)?

--

One recurring theme in these six items is the phrase Blackbaud likes to use: “one source of truth.”  How often do we have multiple, overlapping, differing, partial solutions that don't connect together well?  The answer: WAY too often!

A second recurring theme is the issue of being Microsoft/Outlook-centric, or not.  Does every solution need to have TWO choices?  Does "Mac support" imply a third choice, or is that just a special case of non-Microsoft?

How many of these things are not “just Church?”  Is there a secular value to almost all of these same issues? (OK, except the ChMS spec)

How in the world could I be involved with all of these different things?  Oh yeah...and make a living at the same time?

Comments

[Derek Berg]

Tony,

I think a majority of the "active" CITRT participants (at least me anyway) feel strongly about each of those topics as well. I think a majority of people would be willing to do their part, assignment, whatever you want to call it to take CITRT to the next step, we just need someone to help coordinate all that. I'm not opposed to giving a $xx (thinking $20/person $50/church?) a year donation to help things get done (plus my assignment of course.

[Jason]

1. Can you have something on this by 5:00pm?
2. Best practices for whom?
3. I love omnifocus. but i also don't use it. there is a balance of demand and personality. Project management tools are only good if you use them, and only some (unfortunately not all) personalities are even inclined to use them.
4 & 6 - Everything to the web. local hosting is dead. OS-based and/or local network based solutions are working with yesterday's tools. browsers are being built to be OS-like in their functionality... the Google model is the near future...
5. the top 100 will always have to make their own. and that is likely a personnel issue as much as a tech issue.

thanks for giving me something about which I know very little to comment on. :)

[Joel Lingenfelter]

Jason,

The top 100 churches do no such thing. Of the top 5 two are Fellowship One clients, one uses Arena, one is (or was, not sure) with ACS, and one has a custom solution. As I look over Outreach Magazine's top 100 churches list for 2007, I see a lot of F1 clients, Arena Clients, and a few Connection Power clients. I would guess that at least 50 of those churches are customers of one of those three companies.

I'm sure there are other commercial products in use, but I didn't research those to the level I did with the three I mentioned...

As for #'s 4 & 6, we have a very nice 6mbps fiber for our internet connection, but it doesn't hold a candle to my gigabit ethernet network. There are some applications that are appropriate for web hosting, but declaring "local hosting dead" is a bit premature. Talk to me when I can have equivalent speed to the outside world.

That said, even local hosted solutions should use browsers and be available via the web at large. There is no reason for most client software these days.

Joel