IanMcDonald Lead time is great and appreciated. Sadly lead time without the appropriate report and therefore the data with which to plan our strategies for the business critical services that would be impacted is useless. Being left to create solutions for potentially 10's, 100's of applications, government regulated responsibilities (where we get fined or lose our license to run services) in 6 months is not possible. Designs, budgets, impact analysis etc etc etc takes time to generate and implement, if the work is not budgeted for in the previous financial year, we don't have the ability to react.
Honestly, sort yourselves out, it shouldn't take 8 months+ (as this must have been in the pipeline for some time) to generate a report for your customers to allow them to plan for this MAJOR change!