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Lisa Johnson :: ljohnson@sagesol.com
“It’s time to upgrade.”
Few other phrases are so fraught with peril, so steeped in emotional baggage, or instill fear in the heart of the courageous. It starts arguments and divides law firms into warring camps. Perhaps only the threat of losing your Blackberry is more sinister.
So someone in your firm wants to upgrade, but why? Is it borne out of necessity, or—worse yet—the response to a slick sales pitch or the fetish of a technology-dabbling partner. No matter how smoothly an upgrade is performed, the process is inherently disruptive to users who are comfortable and productive with their current tools. There will be some downtime and loss of productivity, plus increased strain on your help desk. To justify any upgrade, whether hardware or software, there must be truly compelling benefits such as compatibility, stability, expiring vendor support, or business reasons backed by real ROI and productivity enhancements.
So Why Are We Doing This?
In a perfect world, the decision to upgrade technology in a law firm would be a dispassionate, well-reasoned decision that carefully weighed all the options and systematically evaluated costs vis-à-vis the benefits. But really it’s like this: the “techie” partner attended a sales demonstration and is convinced that an upgrade is absolutely vital to the firm for reasons that can’t quite be fully expressed; or a few partners claim that the network is slow and complain to the IT Director, Firm Administrator, and Managing Partner until they cave.
In light of these scenarios, here are four objective criteria to determine whether it is time to upgrade:
Unfortunately, only half of these reasons may result from circumstances under your firm’s control. Trends in corporate or legal information technology, or worse yet, a large software maker decides they will no longer support an earlier version, may hoist the decision to upgrade on the firm. Compatibility issues came into play with many firms, forcing a move from WordPerfect to Word as the standard document format. Many firms moved to Word to conform with their corporate clients’ systems.
Increasingly, a primary determinant is the so-called “end-of-lifecycle,” when software companies no longer support prior versions of their applications. This practice seems particularly insidious when users do not exploit all the features of the old version, and new versions do not offer compelling features that would warrant upgrading anyway. Microsoft ended support for its Windows 2000 products in June 2005, forcing many to upgrade to XP. However, many firms have chosen to bravely soldiered on “without” support. With the impending launch of its new operating system, Windows Vista, Microsoft has already announced the end of software support for Windows XP home edition in December 2008. Microsoft is only the most visible example; DMS, accounting, and litigation support vendors retire software versions all the time.
