One of my most vivid memories from growing-up is my grandmother’s gas stove. It was the center piece of her kitchen, and it was built like a tank. It was white enamel and had four burners on top plus a large oven with shelves that could hold a pretty big turkey at Christmas. She owned that oven for decades and never had a single problem with it. I remember my sister offering to buy her a brand new state-of-the-art replacement for it when it was about twenty-five years old and my grandmother telling her she was not interested. In her immortal words, “They don’t build ovens like they used to!”

It was about ten years after that when I received a frantic phone call from my sister saying that my grandmother’s oven had blown up and burned off all my aunt’s hair and face! Of course, my grandmother was prone to exaggeration, and we later learned that in attempting to light the oven with a match, after turning the gas on at least twenty seconds earlier, the oven emitted a small bang resulting in some singed hairs on my aunt’s head. The truth was that it was a usage error on my aunt’s part, and there was nothing wrong with the oven. However, the drama was enough for my sister and aunt to now demand that my grandmother’s oven be replaced, and so it was.

In the information systems world, keeping a software version or application for a long time is not uncommon. According to recent studies, 70% of the world’s business applications still run on COBOL, with much of this code written more than twenty-five years ago. The fact is that if the software is working and doing the job effectively, there is no reason to replace or upgrade it.

While Business Intelligence software is a lot more current than most legacy application code, it is still software, and the same upgrade arguments apply. BI software vendors can provide a plethora of arguments as to why you should upgrade your software, but there are two main ones that stand out the most.

First, stay on a supported release, so the vendor can assist you if you should encounter a problem. Most BI software vendors only support the current and the previous release. Anything prior is considered no longer supported, and the fix for almost any software problem will be to upgrade to the current release.

Second, take advantage of new features and functionality in the latest releases that could add value to your business or operation.

From my experience, both these arguments are not always valid. Just like with my grandmother’s stove, if the software is working, and there are no problems, why should you upgrade to the latest release? A large BI customer I recently visited has been running on an unsupported software release for more than two years. During that time, they have not logged a single software support call, even though they have been paying a large amount of maintenance dollars to the vendor for support. The irony is that if they do upgrade to the latest and greatest software release, they will probably be placing a lot of software calls.

Likewise, regarding new functionality, while many such features are included, many are also sold as add-ons that must be paid for and so invariably these items come at a price. Also, based on the way the customer is using the software, they may never take advantage of the new features.

The bottom line is, you should carefully weigh up the pros and cons before upgrading or replacing your BI software and not just do it to stay current. Stability and dependability in your business is more important than just being able to tick off a box to say you are running on the latest supported release. Also, wherever possible, make sure there is a valid and measurable business benefit to the upgrade.

Both the rate of release of new software releases, and the complexity of the ever-growing number of environments that it has to seamlessly work in, has taught us to be cautious. Most experienced customers will wait until at least the first or second service pack of a software release before even considering testing it.

To borrow from my grandmother’s words of wisdom “They don’t build software like they used to.”