IT Governance is an area of practice that many CIOs in for-profit businesses struggle to get movement on. This may be because when pushed up against a deadline, most staff just want to get things done and forget the “arbitrary rules” they don’t understand the benefit of. In some ways, this is our American culture pushing us to conquer our enemy with whatever method is necessary so long as it isn’t illegal or immoral.

Recognizing that most ministries have no less pressure to perform than what is found in enterprises, I pondered if it is even practical to request staff to live within boundaries which are hard to define and harder to nicely, kindly enforce. After all, most executive staffs do not even understand the legal and security risk of not governing IT well. None the less, the world of IS is chaos without direction and management.

What I knew from the beginning was that we couldn’t create respect by waving a thick policy around and carrying a large stick. Church IT Governance has to look a lot more like relationships than yet another religion, so I did my best to prepare our staff for the rules by building trust and respect in my first six months here. Then, we rolled out this Information Systems Policy (PDF) as a section within our larger Employee Handbook.

Feel free to download it and use whatever is applicable to your context. I wrote about 40% of this, took 20% from another church (they offered), and the remaining 40% is a remnant of what was here before I arrived. Our HR Director also provided editing services. One of our goals was to make it as brief as possible without sounding harsh. Hopefully we struck a balance, but I would love feedback and comments on how we did.

Tony Dye also made The Perimeter Church generic manual available for download a few years back and it seems to be a bit more conversational.

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.

My old office-mate Barry Buchanan was giving me a hard time in a comment on my last post, and so I thought I would cross-post one of his fine cartoons that illustrates what my team has been going through lately. You can laugh more at Barry by subscribing to his feed.