Development continues on the Internet Mission Office System (iMOS), a new Web application that allows mission office staff to manage their organization and perform financial tasks. Project 2 has ended, and Project 3, which will complete the main finance features and enhance existing finance and mission organization sections of the application, is in progress.

Currently, about 30 missions are using the system’s mission organization functionality in a beta testing stage of the application rollout. Three of these missions are using the finance features. The Missionary Department expects to add more missions to the beta testing group soon and will begin a general rollout in January 2009.

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Aaron Chomjak is a technical program manager for the Church.

“If you want to make a correct decision or solve a problem, large groups of people are smarter than a few experts.” —James Surowiecki

A Problem for Consideration

The goal of increased efficiency and lower costs is nothing new in the tech industry. At the Church, those pressures are acutely felt, along with the moral obligation to wisely spend the widow’s mite. I’d like your help and suggestions on the best approach to solving a problem.

The Church sponsors and supports multiple outward-facing Web sites, such as LDS.org, Mormon.org, Provident Living.org, and stake and ward Web sites, to name a few. Most of these sites provide a way for site visitors to offer feedback. We need the capability to uniformly and consistently track, route, and reply to feedback from member and nonmember visitors to the various LDS sites we now support.

The problem is this: the existing process for screening, routing, and responding to submitted feedback is slow and labor-intensive, will not scale to the future needs of the Church, and is incapable of supporting multiple languages.

Please consider the following questions:

• What options should the technical staff here at the Church consider in the next version of this service?
  

• Are there credible existing commercial solutions?
  

• Is a custom application the best alternative?
  

• Is a mix of custom code and existing commercial applications an appropriate approach?
  

• How would you solve the problem? 

When we design and write systems for our customers, do we look toward helping them accomplish their work, without getting in the way? We need to look critically at our systems to decide if they are too feature-laden and whether they just get the job done. There are many things that we use every day that we don’t notice because they completely blend into the actual task we are performing.

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Procrustes was the ancient champion of enforced conformity. In Greek antiquity, he was a legendary highwayman who lived in Attica. He had an iron bed, which he regarded as the standard of length. Because it just fit him, he concluded that everyone should fit it. He stopped every traveler and tied him to the bed. If the person happened to be too short, Procrustes stretched him until he attained the correct length. If he happened to be too long, his legs were cut off until he met the proper requirement. Thus, everyone was made identical in size.

The iron bed on the highway of Attica has been supplanted by one on "the highway of information technology." It operates now in the field of technology, rather than in the physical realm. Every technology provider has its own bed, and all who would sojourn among them must be expanded or contracted, distended or diminished, enlarged or compressed, according to the product. 

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You know the scenario: as General Conference begins, you gather pen and paper, tune in to KBYU or LDS.org, recline back on your couch, and then try to stay alert for the next two days. October’s conference was a little different. About 150 people participated in an online conversation on Twitter, using the #ldsconf hashtag to share thoughts, comments, and other feedback throughout General Conference.

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a microblogging service akin to group instant messaging. People post little reflections (“tweets”) about what’s going on in their lives, and they keep up with tweets from other people they choose to follow. You can follow thousands of people, or just a few.

When participants add hashtags to their tweets, such as #ldsconf, Twitter enables a community of people to gather virtually during an event. Through the hashtag, you can connect to a community of all other twitterers adding the same hashtags in their tweets, regardless of whether you’re following them or whether they’re following you.

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Over the summer, the Church released a new version of the Meetinghouse Locator called LDS Maps. This can be accessed from LDS.org and mormon.org or directly at maps.lds.org.  This application has proven to be a valuable tool to locate places of worship anywhere in the world.

One of the best features of the new LDS Maps application is its ability to allow Web users to submit feedback directly to the LDS Maps development team at the Church. We appreciate community members around the world who have reported location errors and data inaccuracies.

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