This morning I was sitting in my local car dealership waiting for service on our minivan and it made me think … how does this relate to an AMS?
- My minivan is an expensive piece of technology.
- With 2 young kids, it is a lot of work to keep that vehicle clean.
- Like any vehicle, the minivan needs regular serving and maintenance to be in tip top shape for the family.
- Like any vehicle, there are items that need to be replaced and/or upgraded.
- And most importantly, you need to remember that there will always be unforeseen costs – like hitting a bird on the highway that punctured the minivan’s radiator … an unforeseen expense of $700 plus hotel stay since we were traveling … but that can be another story.
It is not hard to come up with the equivalent AMS items.
- To purchase and implement a new AMS is an expensive endeavor or any association.
- Keeping an AMS clean is hard work. Just like kids in a minivan … the association has a wide variety of “kids” with their fingers in the AMS – it could be anyone from trained and educated (one would hope) staff to the association’s constituency online.
- To keep your AMS in tip top shape, you must also do a variety of regular maintenance and servicing – such as merging duplicates, deleting unwanted records, etc.
- To keep your AMS current with other technologies, you must periodically upgrade the version of your AMS as well as corresponding elements – a new server, etc.
- And yes, there are unforeseen things that creep up with an AMS. Maybe you bought your AMS prior to ecommerce and now you want to add it in. Or maybe you were not anticipating significant staff turn over that you need AMS training. There will always be these unforeseen items.
What I really wanted to relate here is that we are routinely confronted by these items in our own day to day maintenance of our vehicles (or other large ticket items), is your AMS that different? Unfortunately there are many associations that to not maintain their AMS the same way they do their vehicles. And the results could be devastating to the association.
