The Intersection of IT and Facility Management

We just released this blog and would love to get feedback as to how much of this intersection you all are seeing at your church.

Thanks all.

Tim, yes we see that. Some of it is here. Some of it is coming. I lead a Technical Task Force at our church that includes IT, AV/Sound, Worship and Facilities as well as technologists from the congregation. This group acts as the glue to all these trends, as well as overseeing our capital improvement budget/plans. We have a 10 year plan that gets updated at least annually.

So what we’ve seen is:

  • Event scheduling that encompasses facilities, operations, AV/Sound, and sometime IT. We’ve built a process that encompasses all the above, but really have been pushing the event scheduling and facilities software vendors to build this into future products.
  • IT is of course seeing more devices on our network, including HVAC control, security systems, lighting, and sound systems on our network, as well as phones, and other telephony in addition to the devices traditionally associated with IT. This requires increased coordination with Facilities and AV/Sound.
  • Besides the event scheduling integration mentioned above, we’d like to see integration of asset management, maintenance scheduling and management, and asset replacement planning across these functions.

Hey Mark…great feedback. Would love to learn about your thoughts on the 3rd bullet.

Related to your second bullet, how are you all navigating costs for the new implementations…i.e. added band width, added cloud storage, etc,? Are those now shared costs or still the cost of IT even thought the costs may be facility or AVL oriented?

Thanks again

We’re seeing this more and more at FBCTulsa. Currently, Facilities has 3 systems on the network now, and we’re in the process of adding several ControlByWeb for their lighting control. Where I’ve come up against a wall is more on the infrastructure side, we’ve had to implement a few VLAN’s to try and segregate traffic and offload some bandwidth from the primary VLAN. Between all the various things we’re doing, I’ve had to setup 7 VLAN’s now.
We use CCB currently and then have 2 different systems that control HVAC and Door Security. Currently, they have to touch all 3 systems for an event. I’d love to see some integration on them all, which we can do for some dollars spent.

Jamey…great input. Would love to chat on this…it is all possible, even now.

You bet! Hit me up via email at jhess@fbctulsa.org and we can even get on a call sometime.