I
was out of the apartment and on the road by 6:00 am yesterday on my way to
spend the day in Elizabethtown. You know it’s early when it is still a dark
August morning when you start the car. It has been oddly cool this summer so
the mist on the windshield stubbornly held on for about a half hour not
completely streaking off until I hit the 70 MPH zone on the Pennsylvania
Turnpike. All told, including a 20 minute delay due to a nasty car fire just
outside of Lancaster, it took about an hour forty five minutes to get to the
Masonic Conference Center. Just in time for the day long IT training to begin.
Surrounded
by what are now familiar faces, it was an interesting delve into a completely
overhauled online membership ad banking system that the Grand Lodge will be
rolling out in due time. While we were definitely experimenting with an early
version of the site, there are a number of things that, in the end, will be a
huge upgrade to a currently antiquated system. Of course, with that said, there
are countless holes and many things that will need to be adopted by lodges before
the new tools and be fully leveraged.
It
was a nearly ten hour day fully of demonstrations and explanations of how the completely
unique system and overall way that things are done in a lodge is now being integrated
in what is normally a one size fits all Salesforce model. While adjustments
have been made, many of us familiar with the company can see where things didn’t
quite fit and take note of how various programs and allowances were changed. Needless
to say, it will be interesting playing the role of IT support specialist for
the district once this is rolled out to all the Masonic lodges in Pennsylvania.
It
was also interesting to watch a young group of presenters get up in front of
the room and do their best to explain all the systems, capabilities, and
programs that they normally pitch to a large company. This was not a crowd they
were used to (but handled pretty well) and many of the questions and concerns
were pushed back or handed off to Grand Lodge officers. Again, we are a unique
fraternity with a system that goes back hundreds of years trying to pull the
rest of our brothers into the 21st century. It is going to be a task
and a half.
In
the end, this is going to be much more than an IT support specialist role that
we all play. We are going to basically have to sell this to our fellow
brothers. We have to show them, no matter how long they have been a member of
this fraternity, the benefits that this new system will bring to freemasonry in
the state, the lodge, and especially to them. It is going to be a long haul
with a lot of extra work, especially for Secretaries, importing, collecting, checking,
and verifying all the data needed to ensure that we all get the greatest
benefit possible from this new system. I guess it will just be a matter of time
, most likely years, before this actually makes my job easier.
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