CIT Roundtable day - Overview

Spring 2007 Church IT Roundtable

April 17, 2007.  This is the day that was the center of the 3-day event.  Even though the Roundtable was just this one day, the entire three days picked up the name.  Oh well...  That's not too bad a problem to have.

The day started bright and early with the giveaway of a nice Video iPod, thanks to Stephenie Moss* of Zones.  Congratulations to Jeremy Czarnecki from Shepherd of the Hills Church, the lucky winner!

* yes, that is the way Stephenie spells her name.

I have to confess.  Despite all our planning and counting and being ever-so-careful exactly who was at the table and who was an observer, well...I lost count somewhere.  Thankfully Chris had prepared name-tags that identified who should be where.  We had approximately 23 people at the table and about 30 more in the room, including camera operators (almost the whole event was captured on video) and sound board people.

We mostly followed the same "roundtable definition" that Jason had used last fall.  (wow -- that link is TWO YEARS old!)  Minor modifications: we did the table vs. observer idea, and I'd pre-collected agenda ideas so we could jump in a bit more quickly.  It was kind of interesting having both Jason Powell and Mark Stephenson in the room.  Jason give Mark credit for the Roundtable idea.  And, of course, Mark gives credit to Leadership Network for the idea.  Still, from my perspective it was neat have these two pioneers as part of the group.

We did some quick introductions, discussed the definition of a roundtable, quickly went through the Table vs. Observer rules, and since there wasn't much objection (or maybe I just didn't ask), we were about ready.  I took one more liberty, abusing my role as moderator, and did a quick show of hands to survey our group for church sizes, staff sizes, etc.  (I'll post those results later)

During the course of the day we covered basically nine subjects:

1. Virtualization
2. Intranets
3. Staffing
4. Monitoring
5. Mac support and integration
6. Training and Documentation
7. Backups and Disaster Recovery
8. Multi-site and multi-campus
9. Policies and Procedures

Real notes are coming for each of these.  Funny how the day job keeps getting in the way of Roundtable follow-up items!

During our lunch break we had special guest Phill Martin of NACBA talk with us on the subject of potentially creating a national organization for IT, similar to NACBA.  The NACBA history is a lot like the history of our group (if we're a group, check out the comments!).  This isn't a direct quote, but I believe Phill said something along the lines of 'let me know of anything I can do to help.'  I plan to be following up with him, a lot! 

Dinner was another special treat at the end of a long day.  Mike Gold, the CIO / Technology Director of Willow Creek, did a presentation titled "The Primary Colors of Technology."  I'll way oversimplify here, but let's just say it was another restatement about the need for relationship more than technology, or perhaps the need to be sure we're using technology for enhancing relationships.

Two days down, one to go. 

Comments

[Ian Philpot]

I hope you're not referring to the NACBA: http://www.nacba.org/

:-)

[Tony Dye]

Yeah, I guess it would have been better to specifically say http://www.nacba.net. Church Business Administrators and bankruptcy lawyers -- hopefully people can easily see the difference!