At one of the last technical writing conferences I attended, I ran into a few technical writers who looked at my nametag (which listed the organization I work for) and suddenly perked up with questions: Does the Church have a lot of software? Are there really technical writers in the Church? They looked puzzled.

These questions never cease to amaze me. For an organization of our size, it seems obvious that the Church must have some administrative software and technical writers, but exactly who or how many or where they’re located is a mystery. In this article, I’d like to unfold some of those fuzzy details about technical writing in the Church.

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The diversity of the temporal activities of the Church requires IT professionals to have flexible service offerings. We try to use industry-based applications and services to minimize our IT resource requirements, avoiding additional human resources costs. We rely on partnerships and contracts with Brigham Young University, numerous Internet service providers, telecommunications providers, software and hardware vendors, and outsourcing companies to move the work forward in a cost-effective manner. Managing IT at the Church is challenging due to diversity, scope, language requirements, and multiple vendor agreements.

We use industry best practices to ensure that we use resources effectively and efficiently. We use diverse software development methodologies, such as waterfall and Agile, to meet the needs of each project.

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In a world where travel is expensive and time is precious, Meetinghouse Webcast can help reduce travel time and increase the number of people who can attend meetings. It can be used for any appropriate meeting, such as stake and regional conferences, firesides, and training sessions.

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When debugging an application that is not performing well, finding the real issue can be very hard. Is it The LAN? The WAN? Is it the application server? Load balances? DNS? LDAP? The database server? Maybe it is the SAN or a disk storage device. We can do things to make it easier. You can arm your application and build it so that it is ready to do battle in the complete operation arena that it will be required to run in.

Arming into the DB Layer

Most databases have a procedural language and the ability to trigger audit transactions, and drive functionality. You can also build in debugging triggers that can track what is happening in the app. You can design your procedures and functions to do the same. If you track how long each type of transaction or call takes to complete, and what the parameters were when a function or package is called, then you have a great tool for debugging development, as well as identifying production issues. If you see that the “create new” function doesn’t take any longer to complete than it did before the slowdown, then the database is not the issue; it must be further upstream. If they are taking substantially longer, then it must be downstream (disk, server, DB configuration, DSS queries in an OLTP database, etc.).

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The LDSTech site is undergoing an upgrade. The upgrade will not affect the LDSTech Wiki or the LDSTech Forums. The upgraded site will have improved navigation. Irrelevant or outdated content will be removed. Before we release this change, please view the beta site. Check for broken links, formatting, and other bugs throughout the site. Report any problems to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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Question

What do you do at the Church?

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Question

What role do you think human resources/recruiting plays in the Church organization?

Answer

Recruiting plays a pivotal role in the success of the Church as a corporation because this success depends, in large part, on the employees we find and hire. When we as recruiters are able to find the most experienced and qualified candidates to fill our positions, we are strengthening the corporation of the Church. Because we know that our teams of top performers, we can expect only the best possible output from them.

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