In order to convince someone to upgrade, you need to convince them that there is a compelling reason to do so. Creating this argument is not a small task, and you may not be in a position in the company where it would be acceptable for you to even try to win this argument. That is, managers may feel that they should do the managing, and you should do the coding. If this is the case, you have several ways to be successful anyway:

1. Convince one manager to advocate your approach, and have that manager do the business case and work on the office politics. This is the easy way.
2. Become a manager. Ouch!
3. Get a temporary assignment to look into this issue, create a project description, schedule, and work breakdown structure. Be sure that you use the same project management tools that the managers use. It will probably involve a suite of programs that all work together.

One way to get managers to change the way they look at things is to come up with a theme. For example, to ship the existing site, managers probably had a theme like "Get to market". You need to show that you understand that this was the idea, and how it should be changed to something like "Secure the site". Maybe your next theme would be "Improve customization" or "Reduce cost of new features". Only propose one theme, though, and keep the theme short and simple, such as one or two words.

These themes give the abilility to convince your audience of something that is not an implementation detail. At the level of the company above your department, the manager probably shouldn't care what version of perl you are using. This manager should care about functionality, usability, reliability, performace, and supportability. (If you memorize the previous sentence it will come in handy.) You will win when you convince a decision-maker that you can influence one or more of these important attributes. The decision-maker will understand the plan in terms of a simple theme, and will be convinced that you understand the implementation details needed to carry out the plan. Someone will have the specific assignment to make the plan happen, and will be held accountable if it fails.

This probably sounds like a lot of work, and it may be that so far no one has had the drive to carry it out.

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma