Page 1 of 1

STS and the Facilities R&I in 2013 - Did you participate? What was your experience?

Posted: Fri May 25, 2012 6:50 am
by johnshaw
I wanted to start a thread to see how the different Stake Technology Specialists were engaged during this latest round of budget preparations for 2013. Were there items you brought to the attention of your FPR to include? Were you approached by the PFR for your input? What was your input when asked or when provided?

I am a stake clerk/STS and work with an FM group that deals only with our PFR. I am constantly playing catch up, a new printer can get delivered, a new computer delivered to an FHC, Internet company goes away for a meetinghouse and I am not engaged, so In my stake, I must work with the SP to work with PFR --> I understand the reasoning, but when I see STS all over the country working directly with FM it makes me green with envy.

For the budgeting process I spent the last couple of months gathering data about our meetinghouses, printers, copiers, projectors, computers, technology implemented, etc... I worked with my Stake Presidency to define a strategy over the coming years, which included their ideas for meetinghouse Internet usage for teaching and training, FHC, video conferencing and webcasts. With that data we approached the budgeting meeting and:

Our first and top priority was to upgrade our Audio/Video
Our 2nd priority was to work for higher internet speeds, 5Mbps down and 1Mbps up
Our 3rd priority was to get buildings wired ethernet runs to RS, P, YW, Chapel, Materials Center, etc...

Posted: Sat May 26, 2012 11:43 am
by sammythesm
Nope. Didn't know about it and wasn't invited to participate. :(

Posted: Sat May 26, 2012 12:03 pm
by Biggles
I didn't get any requests from FM about equipment replacements etc..

However our Local Unit Support office administrator sent out a reminder, to all the STS's in his area, to make sure that the FM Group were made aware of any equipment that needed replacing (warranty, age etc..), for next years budget.

Posted: Sat May 26, 2012 2:18 pm
by aebrown
JohnShaw wrote:I wanted to start a thread to see how the different Stake Technology Specialists were engaged during this latest round of budget preparations for 2013. Were there items you brought to the attention of your FPR to include? Were you approached by the PFR for your input? What was your input when asked or when provided?

I wasn't approached by the PFR, but since I participate in stake presidency meetings where the budget cycle was mentioned, I knew about it before the PFR did. Once I knew it was budgeting time, I took the initiative to send my request to the PFR. From a technology perspective, our biggest issue is that one of our buildings has an older firewall and wireless coverage for only about a fourth of the building, so I requested a Cisco 881w firewall, as many 1041 WAPs as are needed, and wired runs to make that happen.

Posted: Sun Jul 01, 2012 8:53 pm
by bregar
I managed to wiggle my way into the annual walk through with the PFR and the FM rep. We visited each building in the stake over a two day period. This was in the last week of March. At that time the FM rep and I discussed the stake technology needs. He suggested I put together a tech request and have it to him by June 1st. I did just that and the FM rep is talking to his supervisor about our tech needs and securing the funding to accomplish them.

I need to mention our stake is way behind in our buildings data infrastructure. So we are playing catch up. So this is a large request.