David Russell

This year we moved to a more standardized form for budget proposals. Each department prepares a worksheet with their estimated expenditures in each subcategory of the budget.

For IT, I prepared something very close to last year’s budget by following the baseline for last year’s actual expenses. Other than a couple of “shifts” that were approved for me to make last year, my estimations on the IT side were fairly accurate. We knew what we needed to do and so I “shopped” and budgeted accordingly. This year, we’ll probably do fewer projects on the IT side because we handled so much last year:

• New Server
• New Server Rack
• VoIP (SIP) Phone System
• Desktop Standardization Project¹
• Improvement in Spam Protection (Postini)
• Storage Implementation
• Plus, many small but consequential tasks

You must read that list slowly to really feel the weight of those tasks. It was a big year for a team that has no real IT department. It’s me and Dave Clark picking up these tasks when we have spare minutes away from digital communications and media. That means many late nights because spare time in digital communications and media does not exist. :)

So we have a lot finally nailed down on the IT side. And things are rolling well. There is always room for improvement, but it helps to have so much in our favor. 2007 was a year of establishment for the IT department. 2008 will be a year of refinement.

For the digital communications side, I think the exact opposite is about to happen! I’m extremely excited about this. 2006 was very much the year of establishment for the digital communications side. There were several large projects that happened including the massive re-building of theaterchurch.com. In 2007, there were a few major things, some internal application development providing support to the staff, many “routines” based on the establishment of the preceding year and last, much research. Plus, much of my focus went into those massive IT infrastructure changes.

In 2008, I am looking at some very big projects—so large, in fact, that I’ll have to outsource a large portion of the development for the applications and services we are looking to build. That’s exciting to me for many reasons! It will free up a large portion of focus for me. I need that. I won’t spend as much time fiddling around in PHP or trying to bend a small web app into submission to serve a need. (Silos!) I’ll move back into front-end development and project management. I’ll focus on organizing our data into one or two large systems and reducing the silos of information we’ve created over the years by snapping up URLs and building microsites and temporary blogs.

We’ve already experimented with outsourcing this year. That has been very successful. Nathan Herald built a fantastic support ticket system in Ruby on Rails. The projects we are looking at this year are massive. And they’ll likely need several Nathan Heralds. These are thousand-hour development and multi-person team projects; most involve high-end technology as well, including Flash, Ajax, RoR and more. It’s going to take some effort to get where we want to go. The projects we are looking into aren’t exactly secrets, but I’m not going to get into details until I see what I get approved to manage.

Budget proposals are just one piece of the pie. But they are a very important part of the end-of-year process for our departments. Our whole year depends on what happens in these proposals, meetings and approvals. I’m praying for awesome opportunities in 2008.

¹ The Desktop Standardization Project reduced significant “weight” of old, non-standard machines in use by our office staff. We moved old gear out and brought in fresh machines—desktops and laptops, according to the needs of the staff member. There were many reasons we needed to do this, but primarily it was to get everyone on the same technological level and provide consistency of hardware to produce more efficient answers to support requests.

[tags]2008, budget, proposal, business, process, communications, digital, web, IT, technology[/tags]