Technical Debt with iMIS: The Silent Cost You’re Paying Every Month
How small workarounds quietly add up and can drain time, money, and momentum.
It’s highly likely your association is carrying technical debt.
It’s the kind of thing that builds slowly, often invisibly, as teams choose speed over structure, quick fixes over sustainable workflows, and one-off workarounds over long-term design.
None of this is usually intentional. Most of it comes from doing whatever is necessary to keep things moving. But over time, these decisions compound, secretly taxing your operations month after month.
Answered in This Post
1. What is iMIS technical debt?
It’s the accumulation of manual tasks, disconnected tools, outdated reports, and short-term fixes that create ongoing rework, errors, and inefficiencies inside your iMIS environment.
2. How does technical debt affect your association?
It slows down staff, weakens your data integrity, prevents automation, and limits your ability to adopt modern capabilities, including AI.
3. What can you do about it?
Start by cataloging your tech debt, understanding where it lives, and using that inventory to build a practical, step-by-step improvement plan. Forget the massive digital transformation overhaul.
The cost of quick fixes inside your iMIS ecosystem
Technical debt is simply the hidden cost of choosing convenience today over capability tomorrow. And nowhere does this show up more clearly than in day-to-day iMIS workflows.
Most associations begin accumulating tech debt the moment the first workaround is created. But temporary solutions have a way of becoming permanent. And when they do, they begin to shape your systems, your processes, and your staff’s habits.
The result?
Routine tasks get slower.
Data gets less accurate.
Your systems stop reflecting how your association actually operates.
Technical debt doesn’t affect your iMIS AMS overnight, but it does chip away at its value consistently, quietly, and expensively.
The Real-World Examples You’re Probably Living With
The following examples came directly from Armstrong’s recent webinar.
You can view the webinar now!
Below are examples of how it shows up, day after day, without anyone calling it by name.
1. Donor Data Lives in Spreadsheets Instead of iMIS
→ Followed by manual uploads to Mailchimp
Many associations still track donor activity in external spreadsheets. When a new gift comes in, someone updates Excel. Then someone else logs into Mailchimp. Then someone manually uploads or re-uploads the file so the campaign is accurate.
But here’s the real cost:
- iMIS never receives the donor update.
- Your single source of truth breaks.
- Your automations stall.
- Your reports no longer align.
The more your data lives outside iMIS, the more your team becomes responsible for manually stitching your ecosystem together.
2. Event Details and Sponsor Information Re-Entered into WordPress
→ Creating multiple versions of the same data
When event registrations and sponsorships originate in iMIS, but staff manually re-enter that information into your WordPress site, you create a duplicate ecosystem:
- One version in iMIS
- Another version in WordPress
- A third version floating in spreadsheets or email threads
Every re-entry introduces risk:
- Incorrect sponsor names
- Outdated event details
- Missing session changes
- Conflicting data between platforms
This is classic technical debt: a simple workaround that eventually touches dozens of workflows.
3. Zoom Attendance Exported and Re-Imported into iMIS
→ Tracking participation becomes a weekly chore
Zoom attendance files don’t seamlessly sync into iMIS for many associations. Instead, staff exports CSVs, formats them, uploads them, cleans errors, and tries again.
The bigger issue:
If completion data isn’t consistently captured in iMIS, any automation tied to webinars—CEU credit, follow-ups, certifications, renewals—breaks down.
This is the kind of technical debt that eats entire afternoons.
Three More Forms of Technical Debt You’re Probably Carrying
Beyond the webinar examples, here are three additional sources of technical debt that consistently drain staff time and data reliability in iMIS environments.
4. Certification or CEU Completions Tracked in Google Sheets
→ Then manually keyed into iMIS afterward
This is one of the most common and costly patterns.
Staff tracks completions in a spreadsheet because “that’s how we’ve always done it,” or because an older system integration was never updated. But when certifications or CEUs live outside iMIS:
- Your members’ progress records are never fully accurate
- Your automated reminders and renewals misfire
- Your reporting becomes unreliable
And worst of all, staff must manually reconcile program data—sometimes months after the fact.
This is not a process issue. It’s technical debt that has quietly hardened into habit.
5. Member Onboarding Tracked in Trello or Asana
→ With updates manually transferred into iMIS profiles
Modern onboarding often requires multiple steps—approvals, committee assignments, welcome sequences, data verification, etc. Many teams coordinate these tasks in tools like Trello or Asana.
There’s nothing wrong with using those tools—but when they don’t connect to iMIS, staff must:
- Update the project board
- Update iMIS profile fields
- Update email systems
- Update the team
- Update renewals and eligibility
This creates manual duplication that never scales. A tech stack becomes “busy work” instead of “better work.”
6. Old Process Automations No Longer Fire Because They Reference Old Fields
→ Staff quietly compensates without realizing they’re fixing yesterday’s problems
This is one of the most misunderstood forms of iMIS technical debt.
Process Automations often break silently:
- A field name changes
- A business rule evolves
- A program ends
- A new vendor integration shifts the workflow
The automation fails—but no one knows until a member complains or a task falls through the cracks. Then staff steps in, compensates manually, and moves on.
But slowly, inefficiency becomes normalized.
Your automation isn’t automated anymore—your staff is.
The Effects of Technical Debt on Your Association
Tech debt does more than slow your processes. It erodes the foundations that make iMIS valuable in the first place.
Here’s how:
1. Time is wasted on routine tasks
When staff manually upload, re-enter, copy, paste, or reconcile data, they’re not doing member-facing or mission-critical work.
2. Data silos multiply
When data starts living inside iMIS, Mailchimp, WordPress, Zoom, spreadsheets, and project tools, accuracy drops—and reporting becomes unreliable.
3. Your single source of truth becomes fragmented
Even small inconsistencies create cascading impacts across renewals, communications, certifications, and engagement scores.
4. Delays ripple across your entire ecosystem
When updates don’t flow between systems, everything slows down—from analytics to automation to member experience.
5. AI readiness becomes impossible
AI requires clean, integrated, continuously updated data. Technical debt blocks that future before it even begins.
Turning Technical Debt Into an Advantage
The good news: technical debt isn’t a failure. It’s a map.
It shows you exactly where your systems need attention—and where the greatest gains lie.
Instead of treating tech debt as a burden, treat it as a blueprint.
Step 1: Catalog your debt
List every workaround, manual process, duplicate system, and outdated automation. This alone creates clarity.
Step 2: Identify “quick wins”
Some items can be resolved in hours, not months.
Step 3: Prioritize by impact
Focus first on tasks that waste the most time or create the most data risk.
Step 4: Build an AI Evolution Plan
iMIS is evolving quickly. The more technical debt you eliminate, the faster you can take advantage of automation, AI-supported workflows, and the broader iMIS ecosystem.
When You’re Ready, Armstrong Can Help
At Armstrong, we help associations uncover and reduce their iMIS technical debt—not through large, disruptive rebuilds, but through practical steps that create immediate value.
If you want to get a handle on where your technical debt lives and what it’s quietly costing your organization, we’d be glad to guide you.
Let’s talk Better iMIS.