"I’d like to have a road map of when upgrades are planned and when to expect them so that we can do our planning better," says LeFave.

The average time between upgrades has shrunk from three years in the early 1990s to 18 to 24 months, according to AMR Research, and CIOs have lost the ability to keep up. "Vendors are pushing new code out as fast as they can?so rapidly that you may have updates coming at you almost monthly," says Pat Phelan, an ERP analyst for Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. "The vendors don’t seem sensitive enough to the fact that the average buyer can’t absorb that kind of change."

With all these difficulties, a few brave CIOs are fighting to push back the desupport dates. In July 2001, 58 members of the 2,200-member independent Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) signed a petition urging Oracle to extend the support date for version 10.7 of its ERP software from June 2002 to December 2004. This petition came after Oracle had already extended the desupport date for 10.7 from June 2001 after customers complained bitterly about all the bugs?about 5,000 of them, according to customers?that appeared in the initial release of the 11i software in June 2000. (Oracle declined to comment on the number of bugs in 11i.)

In the end, Oracle and the OAUG compromised, and the desupport date was extended to June 2003. The other major enterprise vendors?J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel, which, like Oracle, have released ambitious upgrades of their software in the past few years?have all extended desupport dates for previous versions in response to customers’ complaints about bugs and performance. (In addition, some companies have found third-party support for software after a vendor-announced desupport date.)

Download These Scream Savers

CIOs have two choices when it comes to upgrades: go along or fight. But both options require more planning than most CIOs do now. Even if upgrades aren’t a continuous process (and some overworked CIOs may think they are), planning for them must be. It’s the only way you can make upgrade decisions without your back against the wall of a desupport date. We’ve uncovered best practices for building a solid internal governance structure for managing upgrades and staying on top of your vendor’s upgrade schedule; for minimizing customizations to ease future upgrades; and for organizing with your peers to negotiate for desupport dates that won’t cripple you. (For more on this process, see "The Seven Lively Steps to an Upgrade," Page 52.)