The Failed Promise of a Software Upgrade

01
Nov
2010

Jeffrey Brandt

(or half an upgrade is worse than no upgrade at all)

There has been a lot of discussion recently among my colleagues about the timing and value of upgrading to Office 2010.  That discussion has mostly centered around the Office suite’s new and improved functionality, the features, the improved interface, etc.  I’m picking on Microsoft, but my points hold true for any kind of upgrade.

In my opinion the feature discussions are mostly pointless.  Running Office 2010 intrinsically adds no value to your firm or your clients.  I say mostly because there are some valid discussions over whether the new redlining/blacklining features in Word 2010 are now sufficient for law firms to drop the various third party tools they use to overcome previous shortcomings.  In today’s world people are trying to simplify their configurations (and save money) and those are great goals.

Microsoft Office already has more features than most people will ever use.  It’s wonderful that the ribbon interface is uniform across all applications (even though some things are hidden in the most bizarre and unintuitive places).  It’s great to see a refinement of this feature or that.  I’d even say the Social Connector in Outlook is very cool. There are still arguably missing features and improvements that could be made (Personally I’d love to see better category features.  One web and one IM field is not nearly enough.  Where do I put Twitter, Skype and other social media addresses?)

With Office 2010 there is greater Office Communications Server (now called Lync Server) and SharePoint integration.  Ahh, now we’re getting warmer.  But improved SharePoint and OCS integration is only valuable if you do something with it!  And, in a nutshell, this is my bone of contention with some of my peers.  Any upgrade that is worthy enough to go through the pain, suffering and cost of installing (I believe in an “intelligent” upgrade process, not simply taking any and all updates the vendor throws at me) is an opportunity to upgrade your work processes as well.  The software upgrade, without the process upgrade is only half an upgrade (actually it’s less than half as the process upgrades is where the true value will come from).

With the 2010 versions of Outlook, OCS, Exchange and SharePoint, have you revisited your communication strategies?   Have you found a way to lighten people’s email load?  Can you adjust processes to facilitate improved communications and knowledge sharing?  Have you reexamined your email procedures and policies to see what still makes sense? With Word 2010, have you looked into all the third party tools you are using (and not just superficially to check if they are compatible with the upgrade).  Rather than training on the new 2010 features, and doing the same old thing with new keystrokes or mouse clicks, have you examined the way you do things?

I’ll throw out some personal experiences here and one non-Office example.  I’ve found that many finance people are simply horrible at process improvement.  I’ve been in firms that have religiously (or semi religiously) upgraded the financial accounting software package every few years.  They are on the current or next to current version of the software.  They’ve got nice new beefy virtualized servers to process their data.  Unfortunately the human processes that interact with that new software are from 1980 (and for some firms that is a generous estimate).  The good news is that means there are some significant improvements that can be made - which translates into significant value to be added to the firm.  Some of it is low hanging and easy to accomplish.  The bad news is some of the improvements are huge projects.

I get why process is always among the last things to change.  Its tough - really tough.  People are naturally resistant to change.  You can force them to use new tools, but you can’t force them to work differently.  But, if, at the end of the day, all you have is a new shiny version of Office 2010 running, you’ve failed.  I don’t mean to belittle that process in any way, shape or form.  I know first hand that it’s incredibly complicated and detail oriented.  There are thousands of integration “gotchas” with vendors lagging behind in their Office 2010 compatibility and testing.  Not everyone is lucky enough to have a clean, smooth running Office 2010 installation.  But, even the perfect, platinum technology deployment is a failure if you haven’t taken advantage of the software upgrade to upgrade your processes as well.