Archive for Church IT
Relationship between IT, Communications & Media
Posted by: |Both the church and technology are ever changing. Churches have to work strategically to maximize its staff, resources, and work processes; otherwise, they'll likely experience duplication of effort, inefficiency, excessive expenditures. This is more true with IT, Communications and Media than any other area of the church. These 3 areas are technologically driven and technologically dependent. Churches can't afford to operate inefficiently because of the high cost of technology. The three diagrams below show the overlap that often occurs between these 3 entities. The overlap may vary based on the size and complexity of the church, but as a church grows these areas of overlap are real issues. It is obvious these 3 areas must work together in unison for a church to be strategic and effective in its use of technology.
The Shared Ministry (Functions) of IT, Communications, and Media
The Shared Technical Resources of IT, Communications and Media
The Shared Staffing of IT, Communications, and Media
As you can see, when these three aren't working together, you will find the following issues:
A. Decentralized Purchasing and Reduced Purchasing Power with Vendors.
B. Employing redundant personnel.
C. Defining redundant working processes.
D. Wasted time getting department heads to agree on priorities, projects, and availability of resources to get things done.
Conclusions:
1. Establish 1 person (the Triad Team Leader) to oversee all 3 department who shares a seat 'at the table' with the senior leadership/pastors of the church. This person needs to have both a heart for ministry, a technical bent, and a very defined vision for how technologies may be used strategically for the church.
2. Appoint a team leader for each of these 3 teams and define a clear chain of command.
3. Each week the Triad leaders meet to share project updates, weekly tasks, and reevaluate project priorities.
3. Locate (i.e. office) all personnel from these 3 departments into one central location to streamline internal communications, project collaboration, creative teamwork, etc. It helps to have a really good conference room.
WOW!!! Since November 1, our email filter caught 484,879 emails because of spam, viruses, malware, etc. This is 81.89% of all inbound emails to our church staff. What would we do without it!!!
Daryl Hunter at LifeChurch.tv referred me to this great resource on leveraging Active Directory on Mac OS X. Perhaps it will help you as well.
Communicating in Disaster Recovery Mode
Posted by: |Hurricane Ike left 97% of Houstonians without power. Some lost phones, especially those who bundled thier phone service with Comcast. Personally, I was without power for 13 days. Our church lost phones for 6 days. In a situation like this, communication with our church family was a challenge. Through it all, we learned some things….
1. Verizon Wireless seemed untouched by the storm while other cell phone networks were trash. Note to self: IT personnel should NOT use any cell provider other than Verizon. It is not fun when generator goes down, servers go dark and you CAN'T call your network admin (who uses an iPhone)!!!
2. Incorporate into your Disaster Recovery plan a 3rd party communication provider that supports multiple forms of communication…especially phones. We used a company called AlertNow to make 18,000 phone calls to our membership. We uploaded a .wav file and imported the home and cell phone numbers of our members….and within a few hours all the phone calls were made. AlertNow said they could make 4,000 calls a minute from thier system. WOW! (IMPORTANT NOTE: AlertNow does not provide one-off phone call blitzes. They are more designed for a subscription based model. However, there are other solution providers. They made an exception for us given our circumstances.
