Strengthening the Stakes of Our Technology
By Ronnie Barnes
For years we’ve run into challenges with the HR, statistical, and accounting reports we send out to our missionaries and Branches abroad. Our reports were being sent back as corrupted files, worksheets returned blank, and some struggled to even open the files. Countless hours were spent troubleshooting problems and questions over the phone. It seemed after carefully reviewing these issues, we were able to narrow down the issues to one key problem. We discovered that nearly everyone who struggled with the reports were using either outdated versions of the Microsoft products we were using or some form of knock-off versions.
Last November we decided we needed to reduce the amount of possibilities for errors. We considered buying all of our Branches the latest Office software, but the cost of getting each Branch their own membership and the fact that I would likely be the one on the phone trying to explain each step, potentially presented even more challenges.
We started looking into what our non-profit license for Google Suite had to offer. Each staff member already has their own Google Suite account with access to Google’s version of everything that Microsoft has. The key differences are that nothing needs to be downloaded, everyone can use the same program, we have more control over the files, and we can easily collaborate on the same file when our Branches run into issues.
As with introducing any new program, there were some challenges getting started. However, many of the staff and administrators were already familiar with the Google Suite from having been taking weekly training courses on the subject for the past year.
Since this change, the amount of time that we spend troubleshooting has dropped significantly because more of our staff are fairly proficient with the program! Even some of the processes our home office staff were undertaking has become significantly less time consuming as they underwent their own training.
For the past two years, we have been challenging our staff to spend time weekly learning more about the programs that they regularly use, with the goal being that we can leverage all of our resources to the highest possible degree so as to be the best stewards of not only the finances given to SLM but also our time and tools.
We praise God that we have significantly reduced the IT troubleshooting throughout the organization as well as increasing the productivity of all our missionaries in their various assignments. These recent measures will help us tremendously as we broaden our ministry in the future.
