May 31st, 2012 • Posted by David Franklin • Permalink
We’ve had several recent calls from law firms saying
“upgrading to ProLaw XII just doesn’t make sense, can you help us?”
Initially I
thought this might be an overly harsh assessment on a competitive product, but
after looking into the details, I think that now is the time to lay out some of
the key considerations that any Client organization should consider when evaluating
a paid upgrade for on-premise, “client-server” software:
- Are you
happy with the product’s IT requirements? I know of many firms that incur the
expense of replicating across dedicated T-1s in order to keep their branch
offices synced up to their Practice Management software. In addition, hiring an
external database consultant to perform maintenance on the product is not
uncommon. An upgrade will also necessitate costly file server, desktop OS and
Office upgrades, and sometimes new hardware ($). Are you factoring all these
hidden costs into your decision?
- What
value are you getting from a paid upgrade? Does the upgrade contain
important features that significantly change the software for the better? Has
the vendor made deep changes to the information architecture that will set you
on a path to real enterprise reporting and feature improvements or cost
savings? Clearly the company will be promoting incredible benefits, but you need
to look under the covers a bit to the underlying software architecture (or ask
someone who understands this world) and ask “is the cost/benefit that is being
claimed realistic?”
- Where does
this upgrade take your firm? It is important to consider any vendor’s long-term plan;
since that is the plan you are buying into and running your business with. Are
you getting important cost reductions? Clear feature or user interface
improvements, and a compelling vision of the future? Is Mobile/iPad a core part
of that future, or does it remain an expensive option? Stepping back from the details of any specific upgrade, are you
seeing much of the same over several years, e.g., routine paid
upgrades that don’t really change the paradigm? If so, it may indicate that the company is milking the product, not investing in the expensive changes that
drive real productivity improvements (you’re the cow, by the way).
If you go through an exercise evaluating any on-premise
client-server application, you are going to quickly find that Cloud
applications can provide a far different, more compelling future vision and
cost/benefit tradeoff. Other posts on this blog and countless others can give
you a glimpse at this future. Now is the right time to look, weigh, and decide
-- BEFORE another expensive upgrade cycle gets underway.
