What is an Admin Role?

I had an interesting conversation today around admin roles and the voluntary sector which I thought worth sharing. 

What is an Admin Role? Well if you do a search on google this comes up: 

An Administrator provides office support to either an individual or team and is vital for the smooth-running of a business. Their duties may include fielding telephone calls, receiving and directing visitors, word processing, creating spreadsheets and presentations, and filing.

Sounds straightforward, easy to write a job specification for that isn't it. 

Well what is an Admin Role in IT then? Here's that same search with "in IT" added: 

Duties and responsibilities of an Information Technology (IT) Administrator. This job includes investigating and diagnosing network problems, collecting IT usage stats, making recommendations for improving the company's IT systems and carrying out routine configuration and installation of IT solutions.

I think we can safely say we expect somewhat more from this role. 

However whenever we at GMCVO Databases are talking about CiviCRM and CRM Admin roles we are expecting that person to have skills more in the latter role than the first, though there is significant overlap. 

So a persons skills might include: 

• Data management.
• Comfortable working with database configurations.
• Excel super user.
• Detail orientated 
• Capable of collecting, culling, and consolidating data for analysis.
• Able to understand key business parameters, so they can provide relevant data.
• Able to communicate accurately and timely.
• Ability to produce reports
• Ability to plan and coordinate.
• Deliver support and training to colleagues throughout the business.

Hope that helps you when thinking about the skills required to manage and maintain a CRM system.