Sample missions IT Infrastructures
From MissionTechWiki
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Mission Growth
One cannot simply list off sample mission infrastructures without some context. Missions have a fairly standard growth model, though there are a number of things that can affect how they grow.
Mission Growth Factors
The main issues that affect the growth of IT in missions are:
- Audiences - Who needs access to the data in the database, and who does the database need to cater to. As the mission grows, so does the audience.
- IT Staff - The capabilities of the staff are more important than the tools available to them. Well trained staff can leverage free tools and can get a mission much farther than untrained staff.
- Mobility - Some mission organizations start as highly mobile. In this case, the standard model shifts such that tools to access data remotely are an initial need, not a need for later on. This moves the technological infrastructure up to a point where less mobile organizations would only get once they are much larger.
- Technology - Technology does play a part in the growth of a mission organization. The tools a mission chooses usually locks them into a box that they are loathe to break out of until absolutely needed. It usually takes finances and trained staff to change the technology in a mission.
- Finances - Finances make all of the above easier. Most missions do not finance their internal IT department well until after they have grown considerably. But a well funded mission IT department will have less troubles getting trained, purchasing the correct technology, and changing to meet the different audiences.
Pages for each audience
7 Other offices or other mission organizations
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About Staff
Most missions find that they cannot get pre-trained staff too easily. Most IT people in missions are regular Missionaries who have been turned into computer people. This is usually because it is easier to take a missionary who has a heart and calling for missions and train them technologically, then it is to take a geek and lay on them a calling and a love for missions.
LightSys provides technological training for missions IT staff.
About Mobility
A small organization can use tools such as hamachi to make a portable office across the Internet. But such peer-to-peer networks will only take you so far. Using some of the Google office/apps tools can help a lot too. But those solutions usually do not solve the need for an advanced financial database system that is web-based.