Coming from a healthcare background, members of our staff frequently heard the statement that taking risks with systems risks people’s lives. From our perspective, this is wise advice regardless of the industry. As a technical leader at your non-profit, you have a fiduciary responsibility to your donors. In those rare windows when resources come your way, your only option is success. Far too many technical leaders get shown the door for failed implementations.
Many vendors, new and old, are racing to create a new generation of donor system platforms. We agree it is long overdue. The approaches, target audiences and reasons are varied. The obvious reason is that the current generation of platforms could at best be kindly described as legacy. The not so obvious reasons are that the new generation generally carries with it three new elements – a higher degree of uncertainty, proprietary control, and higher cost.