Many Lawson Software users are facing a dilemma common to companies that have installed enterprise business applications: They ssee the benefits of upgrading to the latest version of the software, but they also acknowledge that doing so will involve significant challenges.

St. Paul, Minn.-based Lawson began shipping its new Lawson.insight 8 Series applications earlier this year and announced an updated release at its annual user conference here this week (see story). Lawson plans to stop supporting some versions of its older Lawson.insight 7 Series applications in October, although the company said there's "no scheduled decommission of support" for the most recent Insight 7.2.x releases.

Nevertheless, some attendees at this week's conference said they expect to convert to Lawson.insight 8 in the near future, citing both the eventual phaseout of support for the earlier applications and the chance to exploit new features that have been added to the software. They added, though, that the upgrade isn't expected to be a simple matter.

For example, Joe Hynes, a procurement manager at Nicor Gas Co. in Naperville, Ill., said the upgrade will require painstaking testing and bug finding as well as retraining of end users and reviews of the gas distribution company's internal business processes.

The subsidiary of Nicor Inc. initially plans to move from Lawson's 7.0.8 procurement software to its 7.2.3 release in a migration due to be completed by August. But Hynes said the company then plans to upgrade to Lawson.insight 8 by next April to take advantage of Web-based procurement features that are built into the new software.

Some other users said they want to wait and see what other companies do with Lawson.insight 8 before making the jump themselves.

"We don't want to be the first to adopt it, nor do we want to be the last, either," said Ted Denca, a deputy director at the state of Michigan's Department of Civil Service. Last March, the agency went live with Lawson's 7.2.3 human resources module, which handles payroll and benefits for 65,000 state employees and 18,000 National Guard members.

The state, which spent $47 million on the implementation, plans to upgrade to Lawson.insight 8 by next January. Rich Huneke, director of Michigan's human resources management network, said the new suite's support for Web browser clients should reduce maintenance costs. But upgrading will require retesting the interfaces between the Lawson software and other systems used by the state, he added.

Most of Lawson's installed base of users has yet to make the move to Lawson.insight 8. Lawson officials said about 460 customers have upgraded to the new applications, while more than 3,000 companies continue to use earlier releases. Another 79 users have bought Lawson.insight 8 as new customers, according to the officials.

"We're a little behind the curve," said Joe Lacik, CIO at Aviall Inc., a Dallas-based distributor of aircraft parts. Aviall currently is running a set of 7.0.8 applications and plans to upgrade to Lawson's 7.2.8 release before moving to Lawson.insight 8, he said.

The company hopes to be on the new applications as soon as possible, Lacik said. But the upgrade will require the development of customized programs to convert the huge amounts of data that Aviall stores about its customers. "We have such large databases that we're pretty much out of the normal profile of average [users]," he added.

» posted by ITworld staff

Computerworld

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