Wards/Stakes/Member CHURCH IT NEEDS!

[russellhltn]

which, again, is only further evidence of why that model will just not work,

I'm sure from "managements" point of view, there's a significant distinction between a few loud voices and the desire from the membership. I'm sure there's is no shortage of members who proclaim that "they" have the vision and the leaders need to listen to them.

While you feel the effort was a failure, I'm sure it made an impression on those who handled it. If thy get the same thing from other stake presidents who deal with shared facilities, they'll conclude there is a problem.

As such, I think your effort to find a new pathway to the decision makers is not likely to get you what you want. What's needed is for each of the stakes who are having problems to run the situation up the chain of command.

The key is the number of voices.

[lajackson]

I take issue that you don't really understand what correlation was and is historically. It doesn't seem to me that you've studied the history of correlation . . .

You are right. There was some duplication. I used too much hyperbole, and a different definition of duplication. Sorry about that.

https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/firm-found ... arly-years

I could write the follow on article. I have lived most of it.

I totally don't get why asking for improvements and new functionality and trying to find a way to move these items forward is mutually exclusive to ministering the gospel.

I did not say it was. It is how we use them that matters.

I realize that many people don't do well thinking in a grand scale.

I guess I am a small thinker, then, a one on one type of person.

I've been either an ExecSec or a Ward-level, Stake level clerk now for nearly 20 years, and I have LARGE Enterprise IT expertise in a Software Services and Infrastructure Services company - these things are near and dear to my heart.

That is evident. And I totally love it when an organization, large of small, is able to accomplish the task at hand.

I tried to state in my original post, that there will always be something that draws more attention. Is there something that can be done to provide the completion of the promised results? Maybe the MoreGoodFoundation could be used

Change "promised" to "desired" (by me included), and I am totally with you. Unfortunately, at my level I only have two options, bug reports and feature requests. I will confess that my reports and requests do carry some weight. But not enough to satisfy even me.

I love technology, and I use it when it works. But I don't let it slow me down. I just go out and make the calls and let the elders quorum presidencies and other folks get to work. Then we can commiserate together about the technology while we are traveling between visits.

[jirp]

The vast majority of changes in the last 40 years are wants not needs. We were managing the church on paper so there was no "need" to go to computers. It simply made things more efficient. So I don't think that definition applies. A better way to look at it might be how many man hours would it save if implemented? Or how many dollars would it save if implemented?

For example our stake used to yearly publish a little membership directory of phone numbers and emails for the stake. I think the last cost of that little book to publish was $2500 printing cost for the stake and the labor to put it together was significant so those man hours are saved. Now instead we can use the online directory which stays closer up to date and is readily available. So now say 20 man hours(guess) a year and $2500 a year can be spent on other things. Across all the stakes church wide that adds up to a really significant savings.

Right now the biggest time waster I see in the ward is the ward bulletin, meeting agendas, meeting guides and the time it takes to put that information on each of them when the information is the same. Lets take our current flow. The music director chooses the music. She has a little spread sheet that automatically enters the song name from the song number saving her a few seconds. It also creates stats on how often a song was used in the last year to help her in choosing the music. She then phones the information to the lady who does the ward bulletin. It is then typed in again with both time wasted and chance for mistake. Then during the bishopric meeting the person conducting then copies it yet again to the sacrament meeting agenda. What if that information once entered by the music director could automatically appear on the bulletin and on the sacrament meeting agenda. Same thing with speakers. Once they are entered once they would automatically appear on both the meeting agenda and the bulletin. If they could be spell checked against the ward list so much the better. Then for bishopric use they are also entered into a database so the bishopric knows who has spoken in the last year so there is another entry that would be nice if it was automatic. In just those you could probably save at least 10 or 15 man minutes a week. Not much you say. Well remember this happens weekly so in a ward over a year you could save 6 to 10 man hours a year. And actually it is more than that because while the information is written on the sacrament meeting agenda the whole bishopric may be sitting waiting for a bit so that is time lost x5 or x6. If this helped even 1/3 of all wards world wide it could amount to a leadership time savings in the 100,000 man hour range each year.