EXPERT RESPONSE
I hate to answer a question with a question, but in order to write a
good business case for an upgrade, you need to know yourself why you
want to upgrade. So, why do you want to upgrade? Is there a business
reason to do so or do you just like to stay current on versions?
Effort and cost always have to be weighed against the risks of doing
nothing. All top-level management will want to see a good business
case, complete with a what-happens-if-I-do (how much will it cost) and
what-happens-if-I-don't (what is the risk?) scenario.
One place I can recommend that you start for why to upgrade is support.
Oracle will only support the latest release of 9i (9.2.0.4 already falls
out of this category), and with the release of 11g, full support for
even the terminal release of 9i has already been terminated. However,
you still have a few years of extended support, so you must have
additional reasons, and to come up with those reasons, you need to
answer the following questions:
- Are there bugs in 9i that are causing outages and/or business
impacts?
- Are there features in 10g that would improve the bottom line of the
business?
- Does the application you are running run on 10g?
- What would the development effort be to upgrade, test and verify the
application?
- Do you need to keep up with security patches for compliancy issues,
such as SOX or HIPAA?
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