10 years full time for Wycliffe - looking back

Tomorrow I will have been working for Wycliffe Bible Translators for ten years full-time. Before that I was part time for 18 months, in a software development role. I started a week before we were due to go live with The Raiser's Edge, a fundraising/donor relations system, if you haven't heard of it. We also went live with a new Nominal Ledger system at the same time.

On my first day the Finance director and his assistant came to my desk and said that we couldn't go live without 5 reports being created. After talking with them we agreed that one of the reports was for the end of the month, and so could wait. So I had a very busy 4 days (I started the Tuesday after Easter Monday) working on those and a million other things. It was also my then boss's first day on his job. As you can imagine it was quite hectic with going live with two systems simultaneously, but we got there in the end.

One of the aims of my job was to move the many different address lists we had around the place into Raiser's Edge. When we went live the two biggest lists - donors and recipients of our magazine Words for Life, had been combined. Ten years on and I've still got legacy systems to move into the right place. I still have four more databases to go, three of which are in progress.

I haven't spent the past ten years just working on importing address lists. We've also switched our Finance system to Sage, changed the way we send money to other Wycliffe organisations around the world, adopted a new group of inter-organisational systems, including a personnel system and re-launched our website twice.

Who knows what the next ten years holds?