The IT-Accounting Hot Potato

Judging from feedback we are receiving from our Dynamics clients, the responsibility for performing system maintenance and managing upgrades is being tossed around like a hot potato. Although not a new issue it is now becoming a more contentious issue with every new release. The story goes like this.

IT:  The only people who care about Dynamics are the finance team – it’s their problem to deal with an upgrade.

Finance: You guys need to get our Dynamics upgrade done for us by this date.

IT: We don’t know anything about upgrading Dynamics and we don’t want to know – really.

Finance: Come on guys. There are new features and reports we want to take advantage of as soon as possible. The executive team will get more valuable information on a timelier basis the sooner we do this.

IT: Alright, let’s plan to do it next weekend.  How difficult can it be anyways?

Surprise!!  More difficult than you think.  Things appear good on the surface but Finance arrives Monday morning and can’t log in, there are all kinds of errors and IT has no idea where to start to troubleshoot the problems.  Finance makes a panic support call to Encore…….”we don’t know what happened….our IT team did an upgrade over the weekend.”

Encore Support: Did they do a backup first? Did they keep any notes of what steps they took?  Did they check for incompatibilities? Did they……?    Did they…….?    Did they…….? 

Customer: We don’t know…they say it is a Finance problem not an IT problem!!! 

Accountants aren’t generally trained as Network Administrators and we know from experience that IT folks are not even remotely interested in Accounting but the two groups need to mutually respect each other’s responsibilities to keep the business critical systems running smoothly.

When it comes to Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Microsoft Dynamics AX the absolute best way to plan, prepare, and execute an upgrade without a serious service interruption is to engage the services of a Microsoft Certified professional organization experienced with the technologies and associated services. Encore consultants do upgrades every week; your team might do one every 2 – 3 years. The cost to engage Encore will be a fraction of what your internal resources will spend in the long run.