What I got from the Church IT RoundTable

After listening to all the vendors, and everything that was said during the roundtable, I’ve decided to do things a little different around here.  I’ve spent too much time focusing on the technology and not enough time on the ministry of CHCC.  Of course that’s my job, but I’ve come to the realization that in order for us to do ministry better we don’t need better technology.  The truth is we just need to do ministry better!  I had made the improper conclusion that our database isn’t functioning like we would like because the software is inferior.  The truth is we never fully planned our database.  What I hope to do in the near future is sit down with some key ministry people and figure out what do we want from our data.  What sort of data will help the ministry at CHCC?  Why are we here?  What is our purpose?  What are our goals?  How can data help us reach those goals and how can it help us measure whether or not we are doing ministry effectively?  Now most of these questions aren’t for me to answer.  The good new is our leadership has been asking the philosophical questions behind all of the above and are working hard at clearly defining what success looks like at CHCC.  From what I’ve heard that process should be done VERY soon, then we can start to work on restructuring our database.  We’ll design our database structure around the purposes and goals of CHCC.  Then we’ll create reports that help us get the data needed to the people who need it to accomplish those goals.  And then create reports that will measure our success or failures living up to those goals.  The key to success is careful purposeful planning, followed up by quality training.

Once this process is done and the database has been restructured and everyone has been trained on it, we’re going to work on our intranet.  The plan is to import data from various data sources (our CHMS software, calendar software, etc) into a single read only database, then design a web GUI to allow people to interact with it.  It will probably start out as nothing more than search box.  The goal is to provide a place where Mary, our receptionist, can look up any information within 10 seconds.  If she needs someone’s phone number she just types in their name and click search.  If she needs to know the times/dates of an event, she types in the name of the event and clicks search.  Over time I’m sure we will develop this further as time goes on. I’m pretty excited about the potential.  (BTW, I go this idea from the roudtable.)

For now, we’re looking into ways to better utilize some of the features we get from using Google’s Apps for Your Domain.  Sometime in the next couple of weeks I’m going to get a group together and we’ll work out a plan for using Google Calendars.  Google Docs & Spreadsheets are on my radar, but it may be awhile before we really adopt that feature.