Exploring the Needs of Parties in Church Management in Building Knowledge Management System of Financial Reporting

Abstract

This study explores the possible adoption of the Knowledge Management System (KMS) in church management which is an agent in the agency relationship between the management and congregation and donors. Since the agents mostly do not realize that they need to know that they are responsible for the presentation of Financial Reports, thus they do not realize that they need a Knowledge Management System for the Accounting and Financial Reporting; the need must be investigated. Moreover, in the case study church, the accounting process is very much not applied as the result of a lack of knowledge. This fact tells that churches need knowledge of the accounting process. All of those types of knowledge need to be managed in a system. The methodology used in this investigation was The Soft System Methodology (SSM). SSM emphasizes on understanding the problem situations faced by church management and expresses the situations in rich pictures. Data were gathered from interviews, focus group discussions and observations. A protestant church in Jakarta is the case study setting, focusing on pastors who give sermons, presbyters, administrators together with employees who manage all churches’ activities. The findings highlight problems faced by the various stakeholders and propose solutions in the form of a conceptual model for a Knowledge Management System platform to improve learning as well as utilizing digitized knowledge of Accounting and Financial Reporting.