Over the course of my 20 years of consulting to associations, I’ve run into several situations where the association is moving from a completely custom system (often designed by someone on staff) to an off-the-shelf (OTS) system. (I’ve written before why associations should not build custom systems, but it happens!)
While I wholeheartedly support moving to an off-the-shelf system, moving from a custom environment to an OTS system creates additional challenges as compared to moving from one OTS system to another. Allow me to explain using the example of report creation to illustrate how the development process changes dramatically.