Milestone Achieved!

I have finally reached a major milestone; I finally got approval to send my dissertation proposal to my committee for their review! Hopefully within a week I’ll get some useful feedback to make my proposal even better and more focused so that I can move forward to actually conducting my research.

Ministry Tech

The Ministry Tech conference held in Colorado Springs on April 23-24 was very good and worth attending. The best part of the event was the tour of Compassion International, New Life Church, and Focus on the Family. Each place provided some interesting and useful information regarding IT management and where they are going strategically.

The actual conference at Woodmen Valley Chapel was good in terms of meeting other church IT people. This was especially important as I move forward on my research topic of IT management in churches. The IT Roundtable held on day two of the conference was the first Roundtable for me; I was surprised at the level of discussions and the various topics in addition to the solutions being offered. The solutions and open source tools are a key take-away from this event.

An added bonus to the trip was on Thursday night, we got to see the live satellite transmission of Dave Ramsey's broadcast "Town Hall for Hope". In this broadcast he reviewed the United States economy and how we got into this financial mess and what we need to do to get out of it. Spending billions is not the solution according to Ramsey; instead he recommends that we each take responsibility and that the failures will drive others to greater excellence and success.

I’m looking forward to attending another IT Roundtable this year. Hopefully there’s one in the Mid-Atlantic region soon!

The Lord blessed us with great weather while we were in Colorado and the ability to see and hike the Garden of the Gods and Castlewood Canyon.