Bill Hutchison's YWAM Blog

Sustainable IT in YWAM?

Posted on Monday, January 8, 2007 in YWAM

This has been a constant struggle for us at our base, and I can imagine it would be an even bigger challenge at smaller YWAM bases. One of the challenges we face is that as our base has grown so has our information technology (IT) infrastructure and our reliance on it. Because IT is quite a specialized area it is something that is often hard to find staff for. I have been at it at our location for about 8-years, and it has always been a struggle getting anyone else to stick at it long term.

I have been talking with a few people lately, including David Couper who I have had the privilege to work with quite a lot, and we are both of the frame of mind that the only way to make IT sustainable in YWAM is to outsource it.

Here is a good example. Next month I will be leaving to Canada and Europe for a holiday and to visit some other YWAM bases. While I am gone there will only be one person in IT for an organization of over 100 people. That person has just joined IT this week and we only have about a month to train him. His past experience has been with Macs and design work. He is eager to learn, but there in my past experience we usually need at least 3 - 6 months to train someone up to manage our network. So for a period of almost three months we have to pray and hope that nothing goes wrong...

Now if the system was outsourced that person would have a much easier time maintaining the system. They would be responsible for adding users, training users, some thin-client deployments, etc. But if anything major happened they would be able to pickup the phone and call a company who would be responsible for most or all of the server and software maintenance and deployments.

Here at Reef to Outback we have had quite a few ministries start, run and then end after the people have moved on. Sometimes the ministry is started up again after a few months or years of down time, and sometimes it isn't. This includes our Event Management Team (never started up again) and our Youth Ministries Team (went through a leadership transition that saw some aspects of it stopped completely and other aspects added and grown). YWAM is a very fluid organization with it's staff and with those types of ministries it is possible.

Information Technology can be a very different type of ministry area because as the area grows, so does the dependancy on it, sometimes (like in our case) to the point where the ministry will not survive at it's current size without it. With fluid staff this can be a massive challenge as if people leave it is very difficult to attract people into the area. Also, because all of our staff are volunteers and we are not very picky with who we accept as staff, our knowledge base can fluctuate dramatically from one person to another.

Next year we are looking at running a "Communication Technolgy School" to try to address some of these challenges facing us in the ministry. Even with an Information Technology related course being run it is still a huge challenge to make IT sustainable at over 850 different locations in almost every nation in the world. If it is financially viable at a YWAM Centre (not always the case) then the best option would probably be to outsource the IT and to also look more at hosted solutions rather then custom and in-house solutions and hosting.