- Network systems
- Email systems
- Workflow applications
- Financial & HR applications
- Training
The Church is peculiar in that each of these systems is enormously more complicated than it might be for a typical company because each of them potentially supports millions of members of the Church, people who aren't considered "employees."
Let me give you a few examples.
Network systems which support operations. Our team provides the networks for the buildings where Church employees work and for our data centers. The networking needs here are pretty typical. However consider the number of chapels around the world. They all need some measure of connectivity either for the ward clerk system (MLS) or for family history centers. All broadband connections into chapels are required to use centrally-filtered internet access. Layer upon the sheer numbers of network connections the complexity of having networks in countries like the Philippines and some of the islands of the South Pacific, places where the network infrastructure isn't as robust as it is in other countries.
Email systems. Providing an email system for Church employees is no big deal--standard stuff. However we provide email for all of the LDS missionaries across the world and for local ecclesiastical leaders.
Workflow applications. The Church has some pretty typical workflow applications: budgeting, ERP, policy management, intranet content creation, etc. But we're also creating applications for use by all of the Church members. In the United States and Canada missionaries now sign up for their missions using an online tool. Once an assignment is made by our Church leadership this tool facilitates all of the logistics of getting them to the right place at the right time with the right preparation. We'll be providing more and more of these applications to Church membership over time to help decrease time spent in Church administration.
Financial & HR applications. Along with the solutions we use to manage the general ledger, pay taxes, manage facilities, et al (all typical stuff), we must also track both the donations of the members worldwide and the dispersion of those funds for welfare, missions, building construction, and so forth. With the number of units and the variety of currencies, you can imagine how complex this task is.
Training. Finally, we don't just provide training for employees. We provide teaching & training resources for members and for local ecclesiastical leaders worldwide. LDS.ORG and other Church-sponsored web sites garner over 50 million unique page views per month (not including FamilySearch). You can't get much more mission critical than supporting the 11:00pm Saturday LDS.org rush to prepare talks and Sunday school lessons for the next day. :)
By conventional measures, the I.T. operation which supports Church employees should be simple and routine. But our "extended workforce," I guess you could call it, increases the complexity of our I.T. operations significantly, requiring that we act a lot bigger than we are.
It's one of the things that makes our jobs so fun!
Joel,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your insight and unique perspective. Not just in this recent post, but since the beginning of this blog. As someone who has recently accepted a position in Church employment (although not in IT) I appreciate the insider view. I'm actually looking forward to the challenges you describe.
It strikes me that while the challenges are unique, so is the opportunity for divine assistance. Could you comment sometime on how you see the Lord's hand in the "secular" side of the Church?
Thanks, again for the insights.
Any job that lets you wear more than one hat is a good job, in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteI'm just glad we don't have to do all of this by typewriter...
ReplyDeleteI didn't realize that all missionaries and local ecclesiastical leaders had email through the church. That would be a unique challenge.
ReplyDeleteDo you ever parse the Saturday night lesson preparation further - to see preparation for Elders Quorum compared to preparation for Primary or Relief Society classes?
It is awesome to see just how easily the Church flows as each week goes by to the next. This is where the Lord's hand comes into play...keeping each one of us where we need to be each day. Thank you for all your hard work in helping the Church's IT systems flow.
ReplyDeleteI've been intrigued by this talk and the tech talks concept and I think its a great reach out by you.
ReplyDeleteI have to say that as a user of church systems in a UK ward Bishopric it feels to me as though we are way behind the US since so many things appear not to be available to us here. (even the tech talks ;o)
Simple things like the ward and stake web sites feature are still unavailable, and yet because the church has it's 'own' mechanism we are all under the same edict that we should not be hosting local versions of ward websites. (I understand the reasons for this and support it by the way, its just frustrating that we are not able to access the feature for our members.)
As a manager of international IT infrastructure myself I understand the challenges of providing infrastructure across the globe but the national infrastructures in the Europe West Area and Nordic Areas are, in many cases, at least as good as most of the US.
I wonder what balance is given to rolling out existing developments to other world areas versus pushing ahead to the next big thing in North America?
So a couple of pleas. Some consideration on this topic please and also, can we have a recorded webcast of a tech talk. (You might even want to consider a live one with email questions?)