How large is the church's IT department now?

[daddy-o-p40]

How many IT employees does the church have now?

Just curious....

[WelchTC]

It all depends upon what you consider the "IT" department. At the Church we have one major IT department called "ICS" which stands for "Information Communication Systems". This is where many of the IT folks work. This department is headed up by Joel Dehlin. It has various departments within it divided into "portfolio" groups, such as "Member Leader", "Family History", etc. ICS handles most of the technology work for the Church as an operational organization, such as MLS, lds.org, materials management, missionary applications, etc. It does not do any of the work for family history. That is done by a whole different organization. The Family History department has a large organization all focused on the genealogy applications (familysearch.org, paf, etc). Outside of these two large departments we have other large departments which will have technical people assigned as well. For example, curriculum has graphic artists, programmers, etc. that help with specific curriculum tasks. I can't give you a ball park number as a) I don't know it and b) that information has not been made available to the public. However hopefully you have an understanding how we are structured.

Tom

[daddy-o-p40]

I was asking about ICS.

At my employer we have IT IT, and Marketing IT, and Operations IT, etc.. Sounds like a similar concept. We have challenges staying away from "islands of data" or what some refer to as being "silo'd".

How does the church avoid duplicationg of work OR bridge the "islands of data" or "islands of tech"?

[weaverl-p40]

IT is always a difficult program to manage, because at least to some extent it cant be completely centralized. In every organization you need IT professions scattered throughout the organization to provide technical support.

The state of utah manages all IT through one central agency called the Department of Technology Services. (DTS). It is housed at the capitol but nearly every other agency has at least one DTS employee, who is sub-leased to that agency. kind of like the department of human services.

Sure makes things a bit more difficult for managers

[WelchTC]

How does the church avoid duplicationg of work OR bridge the "islands of data" or "islands of tech"?

ICS does not create projects on their own but are approached by other departments to create projects. If a department cannot handle a project with it's own staff, it will engage ICS. So this avoids most duplicate work.

Tom