Nicholas C. Johnson

I attended LDS Tech Talks in Salt Lake last Thursday. It was wonderful to see the redirection in external focus the Church is emphasizing now. As an example of this, check out the new LDS Tech site currently in beta. There were eight breakout sessions to choose from and I selected three that really made it worth going down: the keynote address by CIO Joel Dehlin, the interaction design discussion by team manager Tadd Giles, and finally a discussion lead by the media/communications group regarding the issue of streaming stake conference to the various buildings within the stake to provide more accommodating overflow locations.

I’ll share some highlights from my notes after the jump.

• Joel Dehlin
• The Church is a supply chain arrangement. We have a product to deliver and we have to deal with overhead, spoilage, etc. just like any other supply chain setup.
• His focus is to deliver the technical platform to spread the Gospel. His primary points are:
1. deliver high-quality content to a global audience
2. decrease administration in order to increase ministration
3. bring souls to Christ
• Church websites not including familysearch.org receive around 50 million pageviews per month!
• The same websites welcome 5 million unique visitors each month!
• The new online application system for missionaries has cut the time from start to call-received in half.
• They are working toward providing portals for various user-groups within the Church in order to decrease administration. For example, allowing a bishop to login from his home to check on numbers/stats/callings/etc. Also, a new focus for web-based training for various callings.
• The top four challenges the team faces are:
1. Scale — how to deal with technology challenges in third-world countries and rapid growth
2. Languages, customs, and context
3. Complexity of content and requirements
4. Spending the Lord’s money wisely — how to have a top-notch IT department while spending sacred funds
• Tadd Giles
• The Interaction Design team is quite new and emerging inside the Church.
• He expects the team to be “jacks-of-all-trades/masters-of-a-couple-things”. For example, business analysts, UI developers, user researchers, and content analysts, etc.
• They use a process that seems to reflect the Getting Real approach in that they use a rapid prototyping process that heavily involves the customer and makes use of real screens to reach agreement.
• Some of the challenges that Tadd et al. face:
1. demand far exceeds supply. (this I like to hear as I’d love to work with this group )
2. maintaining consistency
3. globalization/localization of content/styling
4. accessibility
5. mobility
6. doing things the Lord’s way

That pretty much sums up my experience. I’m very glad I drove the six hours total to attend.