Greg Seyk, newly appointed CIO of VisionQuest, had only months to rid his organization of its Y2K bugs. (Y2K, after all, was not a top priority for the Tucson, Ariz.-based national youth services organization, whose mission is to keep kids out of jail, and Seyk had just come on board the previous spring.)

The first thing Seyk did was purchase a Y2K-compliant ERP system?Lawson Insight version 7.1.5?from Lawson Software, a St. Paul, Minn.-based vendor. But just as he and his staff of five got around to testing the software, Lawson released a new version (Lawson Insight version 7.1.6) that included a function for prioritizing bill payments. That function had been promised but never delivered in any of the previous versions, Seyk says.

With just two months to go before the clock struck midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, Seyk didn’t have time to deploy the upgrade, even though the payment prioritization function had been a critical selling point for the 53-year-old CIO. "We had to implement accounts payable, the general ledger, payroll and human resources to make sure they were Y2K compliant. It was no small feat," says Seyk, who is also a vice president of the private company.

Between November 1999 and July 2001, Lawson released seven new versions of its software to fix bugs or add functionality that had been promised but absent in each previous version. Seyk was outraged. He documented his problems in a series of letters to Lawson executives, met with them on two occasions, and sank a total of $594,974 into software and maintenance to correct the flaws in their products.

And then it dawned on Seyk why the software and support were so bad: That’s the way vendors make money. They push products on the market before they’ve been adequately tested, demand payment up front and then are often not available to deal with the sequelae of poorly performing products. (Lawson officials declined to comment specifically on VisionQuest’s problems with its software. All a Lawson spokesperson would say is that the company is working with VisionQuest in an effort to resolve its concerns. "We are committed to 100 percent customer satisfaction," says Bev Bergstrom, vice president of communications for Lawson.)

How Bad Software Pays Dividends

CIOs have been complaining about poorly designed and buggy software forever. In a recent survey on CIO.com, almost half of the 88 IT professionals questioned said they were unsatisfied with both the quality of their business software and the support. (For full survey results, see www.cio.com/printlinks.) The problem is a big one: Faulty software costs businesses $78 billion per year, according to Jim Johnson, chairman of The Standish Group, a research company based in West Yarmouth, Mass.