C.2 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY UNIT
Mrs. Anne Gichuru, the Information and communication Technology (ICT) Manager has continued to give different kinds of IT support to all departments, including identification of IT needs, acquisition of hardware and software, coordination of maintenance of computers and telephone system, training of staff on use of software, and so on. Specifically, the Unit achieved the following tasks in the year:
a) Acquisition and configuration of fundraising software (Exceed Basic) for the Resource Mobilisation Manager. The programme can keep a good database of members, donors, events, manage gifts, produce reports for management, and so on. The software was a donation from Mr. Siebrand Petrusma, retired Publishing Director of the Australian Bible Society. We sincerely appreciate this support. Staff from the department, FCBH and IT units were trained in use of the soft ware.
b) Involved in the training of BSK Team Leaders (Management staff) in preparation of budgets following the new Funding Reform method of preparation of budgets.
c) The ICT Manager Mrs. Gichuru was fully involved in setting up and supporting of the Epicor project after her training on SQL 2000 server administration.
d) Trained Team leaders on MS Powerpoint presentations on 2nd November 2005. New translators were trained in use of computers between 8th and 11th August.
e) ForMinistry.com Web Services
The ForMinistry.com Kenya web design programme was launched on 28th February 2003. Its objective is to train and assist Church web editors to design and maintain their church web sites using solutions made available to BSK by the American Bible Society. This service is given free of charges to Churches and Christian Organizations. The ICT Manager facilitated two training sessions from 7th to 11th February, and from 25th to 28th October 2005. A total of 14 web editors were trained in the year, giving a cumulative trained total of 91 editors by the end of 2005. A number of these have already bought domain names and posted their websites in the Internet. We have however been constrained in the training because of lack of training computers. These get borrowed from BSK staff for the occasion, which has not been good for the members of staff who release their computers. We have written a proposal to acquire computers for the unit with a view to setting up a lab for training purposes.
The Unit embarked on fulfilment of the 1st year of fulfilling the Strategic Plan. Only ForMinistry Plans were not fully achieved because of lack of computers.