We’ve had a great discussion pre-lunch at the Florida Church IT Roundtable today. Great to hear different perspectives on how best to serve church staffs with foundational technologies. Interesting also how staff culture impacts how staff adopt and leverage technologies, as well as the opposite of how technology platforms impact church staff culture in the areas of collaboration, sharing, planning, communication, and more generally fellowship.
BOTTOM LINE: Get rid of old computers before they get rid of you.
A challenge I immediately saw upon beginning work at this church was that they were understaffed in the desktop and network support areas. They had two (count them) people supporting 90+ computers and 45+ checkin machines. We quickly hired a third person, but our helpdesk resolution average continued to push five business days. One of the things that exacerbates the lengthy resolution time is that 50+ user computers are over 4 years old. We immediately set out to get budget to replace between 33-45% of user computers in 2008 with Macs (more on that in a later post).
So as we have begun to take some computers out of circulation, we are getting more and more people interested in computers that for all intents and purposes should be burned in malicious ways. But, they know IS has them and come asking for computers to do this or that or the other. It is just plain hard to get rid of these computers since there is still a bit of life left in them.