See previous posts in this series:
The ChMS conversation we started (but know we’ll never finish)
Choosing a ChMS – the risk calculation

Also earlier posts on related subjects:
Integrating CRM and the Web
Open source Church Management System (ChMS)

No customer lock-in
So what could ChMS vendors do to help me with my conundrum and reduce the risk that I’ll make a bad choice? First, let me suggest a non-technical answer: they need to reject the tempting strategy of achieving and maintaining customer lock-in. They need to go out of their way to make it easy for me to change in the future if I so desire. In other words, they need to set aside their interests and focus on the interests of the Kingdom (and in so doing, they’ll find that their interests are served as well). Instead of competing primarily on a feature list, they need to compete on ease of integration, openness, and customer services. If the vendor can achieve lock-in, they don’t have to be great at these things because they’ll have acceptable rates of customer retention regardless, at least in the short term. On the other hand, if the ChMS vendor rejects the lock-in strategy, my risk as the buyer goes down because I know the vendor will have to continue to earn my business long after the initial sale and implementation.

Second (and this is much more difficult), ChMS suppliers need to find their way towards an open ChMS marketplace. By “open” I mean one in which innovation can originate from many places and come together to meet the needs of a particular church at a particular time. For example, wouldn’t it be great if Granger could run Saddleback’s small groups system with Fellowship’s check-in and WEC’s content management? Wouldn’t it be awesome if Perimeter could run Shelby with Resurrection’s missions opportunity registration system? Wouldn’t it be excellent if Resurrection could run iModules’ online community tools with Perimeter’s Elder system and a web store like OS Commerce? I’m envisioning a marketplace in which there could be multiple for-profit companies contributing technology and services alongside churches, para-church organizations, and open source communities giving away software that automates their process innovations. Wouldn’t that be a major advancement for the Kingdom?

What is stopping us from doing this right now? Well that’s easy enough to answer. The systems I mentioned were built at different times on different platforms by for-profit and non-profit organizations without ever considering the possibility of interoperability. So that’s a big technical barrier. Also, the ChMS vendors don’t see an economic incentive to cooperate with their competitors, which is a big non-technical barrier. Could we overcome these barriers going forward?

To overcome the technical barriers, it seems to me we would need three things:
1. A common schema for data exchange. (The best technology for this right now is XML.)
2. An architecture for generating and handling data change events (such as a Web Services API).
3. An architecture for single sign-on.

Tony posted a comment in which he used the term “platform” to describe what we need. He also quoted me in the ChMS Google group, which attracted a number of comments exactly along the lines I’m thinking.

More in the next post …

At the Roundtable we had an extensive discussion of approaches to automate worship attendance. Today Kevin McCord weighs in on the same subject. He thinks printing out a nametag will be enough incentive to get many/most worship attendees to stop at a kiosk and check in.

As I alluded in the previous post, a huge consideration for me in choosing our next Church Management Systems (ChMS) is minimizing the risk of making a bad choice. The question of ChMS is the most strategically complex and the riskiest decision I’ve faced since becoming IT Director at Church of the Resurrection three years ago. Why do I say that? What makes this decision especially risky?

The risk is high mainly because Church Management Systems automate core processes. In business or church, whenever you automate core processes you set in motion a complex interplay between your operations and your technology. You adapt the automation system as best you can to fit your processes and you inevitably adapt some of your processes to fit the automation system. You train your staff on the system and over time they develop some deep expertise in its quirks. You purchase and integrate other technology with the system. Before long, the thought of changing the system becomes nearly unthinkable. Companies that build and sell systems that automate core processes understand this very well. Once they get a customer fully on board with the system, they know it will be very difficult for the customer to go another direction. The customer is “locked in” and they’re happy (that is, the vendor is happy).

Going forward from the initial implementation, a ChMS is likely to become a two-edged sword. While your operations become more efficient, operational innovation can be held back if the automation technology can’t keep pace. Curtis Harris of Fellowship Tech asked at the Roundtable if it wasn’t possible to have a set of best practices that the system would automate, benefiting all churches that use it. I don’t believe that’s 100% the case (although we all can and should be learning from each other). The best senior pastors are the innovators. They zig when everyone else is zagging. So there’s bound to be some mismatches between what any particular system does and my particular church’s unique way of doing ministry. I strongly suspect that will be the case for other churches too.

Right now Resurrection is too dependent on Shelby. If Shelby doesn’t keep pace with new technology and new ministry models, there’s not a lot we can do because we’re “locked in.” If we go out and find a new system that “stinks the least” and change to that system, we might be better off than we are now, but fundamentally it’s the same strategy. Our risk of Shelby not performing simply changes to a risk of the new vendor not performing. And ultimately, I don’t believe it will be possible for Shelby or any vendor to perfectly, exactly meet our needs.

So what could ChMS vendors do to help me with this conundrum and reduce the risk that I’ll make a bad choice? I’ll share some thoughts on that in my next post.

After a long day of sharing at the IT Roundtable about everything from WiFi to training and volunteers, we took a break around 4:30 pm and began a lot of conversations in groups of 2 to 5 people. The reps from Shelby, ACS, and Fellowship Tech joined in those conversations. That went on for a couple of hours until the long-awaited Church Management System (ChMS) discussion began. We were just warming up when the pizza arrived courtesy of Shelby and suddenly food seemed more important than ChMS (imagine that!). After pizza we toured the facility and had more conversation in small groups. I think I was one of the last to leave at 10:00 pm. So we started the conversation (or more accurately we continued the conversation that has already begun in the blogosphere and on Tony’s Google group), but we didn’t finish it. Reflecting on that, I realized we will never finish it. So here is another installment in the conversation …

To open the discussion I put up the question: “What do we need the system to do?” This is the usual starting place because we typically think system selection is mostly a matter of determining which system’s features have the best match with our needs. Everyone around the table, with the notable exception of Terry Chapman, agreed with my assertion that no available system perfectly meets our needs today. (Terry is the CIO at Fellowship Church, so Fellowship One is a hand-in-glove fit for them.) John Dolan then rephrased my question as: “Which system stinks the least?” And Tony Dye focused in on the “we” in my original question. “Who is ‘we’?” he asked.

Exactly. Depending on who “we” are, a given system might meet our needs. But unless we built it ourselves, as Fellowship Church did, we’re probably stuck forever with the question, “Which system stinks the least?” (And by the way, Terry said he doesn’t recommend building your own ChMS.) So we start with the assumption that, at a high level, the first issue is “build it or buy it?” And most of us get to “buy it” pretty quickly, perhaps without even consciously considering “build it,” because that option is simply not feasible for most of us.

I then wondered out loud whether “What do we need the system to do?” is the right question with which to begin. I would like to ask what I think is a pre-requisite question. In fact, my question challenges the assumption that our top-level options are build it or buy it. My question challenges the assumption that we have to choose a commercial or open source system and run with it. My question is, “What kind of structure do we need in the ChMS market?” Or, “What kind of business model would optimize the relationships among churches and ChMS suppliers?” Or, “Why should I have to choose whether to run Shelby, ACS, or Fellowship exclusive of the others?” Either/or choices might be our only choices today, but can we imagine a marketplace in which both/and is a possibility? That would radically alter the risk calculation and make my job as IT Director much easier. What technical and non-technical principles would need to be in place for such a world to come into existence?

Ruminate on that a bit while I compose my next post. And feel free to comment. 😉

What an awesome experience it was to be at Granger Community Church with a bunch of other “church nerds” talking about church IT! My only complaint is that our time together was too short. It was great to meet so many of you in person after reading your blogs, and great to renew acquaintances with old friends.

A big “thank you” to Jason for organizing the event and hosting us. Granger is a place where God is doing remarkable things. It was inspiring just being in their facility and interacting with their people.

We definitely need to do it again some time.

We’re blocking both MySpace and Facebook at our firewall. Our youth pastor and his boss decided to do this because the school districts are doing it. Their argument is: Why should we be less restrictive than the schools? I’m conflicted about it.

Do you have web content filtration in your network? If so, do you block social networking sites? What are the pluses and minues?

By the way, Scoble says MySpace is for kids; Facebook is for adults. Makes sense.

This morning Mark Batterson posted about how after leading the Ethiopian Eunuch to Christ, Philip “teleported” to Azotus (actually the text says “the eunuch did not see him again … Philip, however, appeared at Azotus …”). Mark compared this to his ability to “teleport” all over the world via podcast. Those of us who are church IT nerds and not pastors really need people like Mark Batterson to put what we do in theological terms. Thanks, Mark. Hopefully I’ll remember this the next time someone asks me about church podcasting.

Check out Tony Morgan’s post today “Lifting people up or loading people down?” Tony, it’s not only volunteers we need to be concerned about. Sometimes it’s staff.

This issue of work/rest balance in life is resonating with me, particularly in light of the talks by Andy Stanley and Wayne Cordeiro (thanks Tony for the synopsis) at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. I attended the Summit with my whole team, several of whom said Andy and Wayne were talking to me. I needed to slow down, they said. So the next week I took a day off and moved my daughter into her dorm for her freshman year at Park University. That was important, but I have some more resting to do.

It’s been a difficult summer:

• We lost a staff person in IT – the 3rd one we’ve lost this year (and it really hurt)
• We had the usual vacations
• I had the most unfortunate experience of passing a kidney stone
• We hosted the Willow Creek conference
• We’ve had emergency outages in our phone service and our database server (which hosts Shelby and Track It)
• We’ve had a number of major infrastructure projects going on including new firewall, new web content filtration system, new anti-virus software, new phone company, new online bookstore, new online box office, updated web site navigation, and the biggest of all, our new location – Resurrection West
• And all of this is on top of our routine workload of tech support, computer upgrades, new staff coming in, and on and on

We simply haven’t been able to keep up.

So Tony, I’m with you. As one of the burdened, I’m wondering if sometimes we’re adding to the burdens of our congregants, volunteers, and staff. If they’ve had a summer anything like mine, they’re ready for some rest. Yet others are ready to take the next step if only we will challenge them. We need wisdom to know when to push and when to relax.

This weekend I had the honor of serving as a volunteer Evangelism Supervisor for the Promise Keepers conference in Kansas City. Around 300 men responded to the altar call on Friday night, more than 100 of which were accepting Christ for the first time. I’ve done this before. It’s an amazing experience every time.

I was too busy with my duties Friday night to take pictures, but here are a few shots of serving lunch to approximately 7,000 men on Saturday.

Promise Keepers has been serving lunch at the conference for years. They have it down to a science. A refigerated semi-truck rolled in, a forklift unloaded pallets of boxes, volunteers stacked them just a certain way, and finally the volunteers opened the boxes.

Each box has eleven lunches. They’re all the same so people won’t take time looking for their preference.

And here they come! (By the way, I saw Jim Walton in this line. I hope you had a great experience, Jim.)

This is the first time we’ve hosted the Willow Creek Leadership Summit at Church of the Resurrection. Ian helped me setup a laptop to connect to the Windows Media video stream for use as a backup to the main video feed that comes in over satellite. Turns out, we needed it in the very first session on Thursday morning due to storms in both Chicago and Kansas City. Good thing it worked!

Here’s the rigged-up rear-screen projector:

This is the laptop showing the video stream full-screen:

Conference attendees in the sanctuary:

People in the Narthex:

My wife, Laura, and daughter, Beth: