A news story that’s making the rounds in the educational space is that of the Saanich School District (British Columbia, Canada) getting ready to release their own student/faculty management software suite – one that they have built from scratch. That’s something that friends and I have talked about from time to time when its come to church management systems – whether there is enough IT/IS savy in churches for many churches to just pull off-the-shelf open source components, and create something usable and scaleable? I think there is. But, as the Saanich story illustrates, there’s a lot to consider when getting away from packaged solutions and developing something of your own.

Just referencing the Saanich story linked, here are a couple of the items that people see and don’t see as considerations:

• The cost of developing the suite ($1.5M)
• The cost of maintaining a staff that builds it, and then is willing to stick around to support it (costs not mentioned)
• The time to concept and develop (took 17 months)
• Similar strategies to develop/self-develop an open source student-focused software suite
• Training

From personal experience of using a content management system for personal endeavors, there’s a lot that if you don’t scope for, then you end up spending more time with things such as building schemas to export to better software, dealing with multiple user sessions, dealing with multiple-non-web-connected devices, and even simple items such as just putting content into the system in the best managed and speed-sensitive way.

I don’t know churches that are trying this. I do know of companies that stepped out of the shadows of their churches and now do this for others. But, could the way forward be more that teams of IT/IS-gifted persons come together to make these for their churches, and then teach other churches how to mature similar groups that create self-designed software? I wonder…