Church silos continue to be a problem at many churches I visit. What many churches don’t understand is that there is more than one type of silo. Communication between ministries (written and verbal) is the easiest to comprehend. Many churches will say they haven’t spoken to anyone in the children’s ministry in as long as they can remember. By establishing cross functional or cross ministry teams you can help tear down that silo wall. There is another silo that exists in churches that I think is more harmful to a churches ability to minister to their congregation. Information silos.
When I first began working at Fellowship Technologies we called them islands of data. The children’s ministry uses an excel spreadsheet to track their volunteers. The children’s ministry spreadsheet contains the most recent contact information they can get from their volunteers. The men’s ministry uses Outlook to track and communicate with the men in the church about upcoming events. The women’s ministry had one of its ladies develop an Access database to track the women in the church.
Where did all of these silos come from?
A Church usually starts with a central database to track contributions and should be using this database to track any updated information on its congregation. Did one day the Sr Pastor send out an announcement saying “I want you all to track only your people in separate databases!” Of course not. There are three common reasons for ministries to begin tracking "their" data in a separate database:
- The church thinks their current database doesn't provide the functionality they need
- The finance or member services ministry implements a "all changes to personal information must be submitted in writing and in triplicate" policy
- Or they think other ministries don't need access to "their" data
I am guessing at this point you might think I jump on the bandwagon and begin trashing my competitors. I mean there is blood in the water it is easily justifiable and the church would probably love to hear me agree with them. I never do. I usually say your current database probably has the ability they are complaining about. The problem is that the staff is under trained or the current database is difficult to work in.
As for the second issue that the finance/member services ministry wants everyone to submit any changes to a person’s communication values in writing via email; that is just silly. Ministry happens with or without a database. Pastoral staff and administrative staff move on to tracking their information in the easiest way possible with little or no regard to the church as a whole. They create a big honking silo. (honking is a technical term)
Don't even get me started on the third issue. If you need an explanation for that one please read "Politics, Silos, and Turf Wars" by Patrick Lencioni.
This is where the data integrity team comes to the rescue of the church. A key element of the data integrity team is that there is a member on the team from every ministry. Does that mean the worship team needs to submit a person to something they have little or no interest in? Absolutely yes. The data integrity teams goal is to keep from saying things like “quit messing up my database”, or “I am going to lock every user out of this system if I see one more miss typed email address!” Their job is to train and empower the end users in how to properly input data.
Should every user be able to input data? Absolutely NOT! But when a user needs to input data to perform their roll in ministry they should be properly trained and vetted by the data integrity team. If that user offends… retrain them. If the user continues to mess up the database restrict their access and retrain them.
Lastly the only way to be successful as a data integrity team leader is to face each day by saying “what am I going to do today so that the church does not need me anymore”. Scary I know. But you should think of the data like sand, the more you squeeze it in your fist the more sand escapes.
God Bless,
Matthew McMaster
Delivery Manager
(with lots of help from most of my team!)
P.S. If Granger agrees with me then I must be on the right track!
http://kemmeyer.typepad.com/less_clutter_noise/2008/02/we-dont-have-a.html