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IT Serves the Enterprise

Introduction

Wycliffe is a large family of separate organizations (about 110) which manages and shares a massive body of accounting, personnel and other data.

By God's gracious hand, today's technology is providing the promise of instant global access to centrally-housed, maintained and secured corporate data. The effect of these tools on the pace and scope of Bible translation has been revolutionary. Wycliffe’s main hindrance in this domain is the sheer lack of available IT workers.

The "Enterprise Architecture" project, often referred to internally as the "EA project", is an extensive package of web-based thin-client applications whose goal is to replace the current systems of mainframe-based COBOL programs which have driven much of Wycliffe's accounting and personnel activity for the last 20 years. This package of systems moves the core operations to a modern, maintainable platform that also ties together the common data used throughout the Wycliffe family.

Enterprise Information Systems

Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) are administrative in nature. They encompass technology and applications that are targeted at keeping the day-to-day work of Bible translation flowing. Specific systems like personnel processing, member and employee payroll, donor fund processing, health insurance, project funding, language groups, and a multitude of others are part of this environment. Needs also exist to track and make available our rich repository of language data.

The various organizational perspectives are being documented using the Zachman Framework. This internationally accepted business analysis tool integrates our business process definition, stakeholder involvement, system design and quality assurance. The Zachman Framework has been instrumental in the creation of proper artefacts (documents and models) and has given us a guide for the correct separation of responsibilities between our leadership, the business domains and the implementing IT departments.

New Technology

Replacing the legacy systems with web-based applications and technology requires additional people, new skills and new ways of working. This has presented us with a significant learning curve in Oracle DB, Application Servers, Portal, HTML DB, XML, PL/SQL, JAVA, content management and Linux operating systems, all fitting together into a true enterprise solution that is scalable and capable of serving the organization for years into the future.

Building this new technology foundation from a multitude of options means lots of analytical and research work must be done to select the right combination of products that meet the needs of our non-profit organizations.

Placing people in defined job positions to build, purchase, install and maintain the Enterprise Information Systems is challenging. Consider the rewarding experience of meeting the IT needs of Wycliffe by applying your technical and/or management skills. Your work will be based on industry cutting-edge technology to serve Bible translation.

Changing the Business Procedures

We are operating in numerous countries where the legal and business requirements associated with maintaining valid non-profit businesses are fairly substantial. Business and system analysts are best for this task by doing careful and exacting analysis. Wycliffe needs them greatly.

Agile Development

We are transitioning from "waterfall" to agile methods. System sprints may be instituted using short term experienced volunteers. If you have any experience in this area, please consider getting involved.

Project Management

We continually need experienced staff in this area project management and many projects await direction. If you have project management experience, discuss the details with us.

Click here a listing of urgently needed IT staff.

Where in the World…?

At the present time, Wycliffe's EIS development effort is based in North America. The people involved are based at the International Linguistics Centre in Dallas (Texas), JAARS in Waxhaw (North Carolina) and Wycliffe Canada in Calgary (Alberta). New staff working in the Enterprise domain, either as members or long-term volunteers need to be based in one of these places and will require a technical orientation period.

Provided by www.jaars.org