Who Are We

Our first challenge in 1990 was to develop a product that could meet 100% of the then emerging
Fundraising and Membership sectors. The market was relatively new and most software offerings were
based on creating a bespoke version of a standard package. Flexible software was not really heard of. As the
sector was new the requirements were relatively new and not fully understood.

Organisation's demanded flexible software to meet their as yet undefined requirements.

Our DOS product dealt with this and provided unrivalled flexibility where users could create new tables and screens to meet their requirements. The product was hugely successful.

We built on this success in 1994 with the windows version and then in 1997 with Visual Alms. These products developed the flexibility even further allowing users to define screens and extend every table they required as well as add completely new tables.

Of course we focused on providing flexibility and had little understanding of what our clients were trying to do with the product. They used its capability to manage many processes such as payroll giving, veterinary records and even animal welfare.

This lack of understanding of what our clients did with the product led to problems seemingly common to all products; difficulty in support, upgrades that turned out to be downgrades, difficulty in training for both parties.

Before embarking on the next generation of the alms brand we decided to form a strategic partnership with some of the leading organisations in the country to truly understand what their issues were.

We made some startling discoveries. Product flexibility also created many problems. As clients created their own systems they also had to create their own reports and analyse their own requirements. They had to employ people who were specialist and who understood databases and database design. These people were difficult to recruit and to retain. New people would often arbitrarily disagree with the way the product was set-up and change it creating different ways of processing and losing the value of the information kept previously. In short costs were increasing and usability was decreasing.

In 2003 when we started to look again at designing a new product we made the decision that we would not design the new product based on any software understanding we had acquired so far as it would be unhelpful.

We created open, collaborative partnerships that could truly challenge how an organisation worked and what software was required to support it. After many iterations and thousands of discussions we created the underlying concepts of alms.NET. The focus was on business process support and best practice not on flexibility and tools.

alms.NET is now established in many organisations and is proving that the best practice model is the right approach. The reduced cost of ownership (in training, support and number of people) is allowing our clients to direct more of their resources to what is important to them. Case study...