I speak later in the afternoon, but some of the speakers ahead of me are entertaining some great questions from the audience about how to get their organization focused on the right site visitors and how to select the best Content Management System. My hope is to be able to address some of these kinds of questions in the Q&A time after my presentation.

There is a matrix that has been around for a long time that allows you to select the Content Management Systems you have heard about and compare them functionally. Check out CMSMatrix.org to do that comparison. [Update] John mentioned that http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/show.php?catid=1&cat=CMS%20/%20Portals is a good option for actually test driving the CMS you are interested in checking out. [/Update]

I’ll include my presentation slides in this post after I speak this afternoon. If anyone has any followup questions on my presentation, post them in the comments to this post.

This blog post is to gauge interest in a Florida Regional Church IT Roundtable event. We seem to have a group in the Tampa area and others along the East coast of Florida from Orlando to Miami. Redundancy could be a good thing, so let’s talk it out in the comments below about what everyone is looking for, if people are willing to drive, and what the focus could possibly be for the event. Whether we land on two gatherings or one, I think it would be good for Florida churches to represent better through some networking, fellowship, and knowledge-sharing.

A Couple Options

I have tentative approval from Christ Fellowship leadership to host a regional event in January on our main campus. If you are unfamiliar with this type of an event and this loose coalition of geeks, here are the topics of discussion they meet on periodically in regional and national meet-ups. Since next year appears to be a tight year financially for many of us, I thought a low-cost training opportunity (typically $50 per person including 2 meals) might be of interest across the many disciplines of Church IT (Websites, Network, Information Systems). We could decide to include vendors in this gathering or not. I tend to want to hold it to just a few sponsor companies ($500+ donation in cash or hardware for give-aways?) so the focus stays on the community of churches. Then again, many of us use contract labor to augment our full-time staff, and they probably should be equally as welcome.

Large Potential Participation

There are roughly 500 churches of size in Florida that might be interested in such an event, including 11 of the largest 100 churches in America. I feel that if we can get participation confirmation from a few influential churches in Florida, many of the other churches interest will rise and our event marketing will go that much easier. For this type of unconference event, you need a broad perspective and so the more participation the better. I think the maximum number of participants my church could reasonably host would be 200 people. Most other regional IT Roundtables call 15-30 people a huge success so I am not that worried about having more people than we can all connect with.

My Thoughts on Focus

In thinking about this since the Fall ‘07 Roundtable at COR, I have been feeling a strong desire for the focus of this first gathering to be on Disaster Preparation/Recovery/Response, Storage and Backups, and Network/System Monitoring/Reporting. Agenda is driven by the participants, but these items seem to have a uniquely Florida focus to them that we may not cover as in depth at a national roundtable event.

Kevin McCord of Oasis church shared with me his thoughts by email:

I would propose having that topic with a fairly broad scope. In a world with hurricanes, arson, and terrorism the following could well become just as important to the disaster response and recovery:

• Internet Campuses (for when the church building is unavailable)
• 3rd Party Hosting to Supporting Web Applications (through disasters)
• Moving to Gmail/Google Aps (they have your data)
• IT support in a multi-site environment (some disasters are campus specific)

But When?

I am thinking Monday January 19th or the 26th might work great since it is after the weekend and pastoral staff take off Mondays at many of the churches. This might also give those who want to drive in on Sunday an opportunity to worship together and then go tour some of the larger churches along the east coast to see what they have going on.

Ok, So Now What?

If you are at a Florida church working in IT or Web, please let us all know what you think about the idea. If you have connections with other churches with IT leaders, feel free to check-in with them to see if the event seems like it would be of value for their staffs. I hope we’ll narrow down a day/date quickly and start preparing. If someone else wants to head this up and drive it, I am happy for that to happen as well. Just want to see it happen! So, everyone jump in here and let us know if you want to participate, when works best, and how many people you might bring.

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.