The tricks and traps of managing an enterprise gis
To sell your users, though, you first have to sell their management. The basic mechanics of cost justifying
your project are well documented and discussed, so I am not going to bother with that. After senior
management agrees to sponsor your project, however, how well middle management will support it will be a
determining factor in the success or failure of the project. You see, they have to at least pretend to support
any project that is openly supported by senior management, but they can subtly sabotage your project when
you aren’t looking. It is counterintuitive to suggest that middle management will encourage your project to
fail, but I have seen it enough times to know that it is more the norm than the exception. But, why would
your user’s management want your project to fail?
First of all, you are implementing a technology that you claim will improve productivity. That sounds good.
But, if you aren’t careful, the only message that the user’s management will hear is that they were
unproductive before, under their direction and leadership. In simplest terms, your user’s management can
perceive that senior management thinks that you are saving their users from bad middle management. The
only way that they can discredit that perception is to discredit your project.
Secondly, where does senior management come from? Someplace far away sometimes. But, often, senior
management is selected from middle management and your user’s management is simply attacking any
threat to their career path to the top. Simply, if you succeed, you will have leveraged your career ahead of
theirs.
So, if you want your project to succeed, you have to find a way to not be perceived as a threat to your user’s
management. One way to do that is to involve them in the project. Let some of the user’s management sit on
a steering committee and take input and direction from them. As long as they have some say in the outcome
of the application, they can claim at least partial credit for its success. So maybe you won’t be able to take
full credit for the projects success, but you might overcome some obstacles that could have caused your
project to fail, and we didn’t want that, did we?
In conclusion, it seems strange to think wistfully of the days when we were out slaying dragons every day to
try and bring home an application to our users that would help them do their jobs better. Our dragons of old,
the actual technology we were implementing in, were a clear enemy, cold and impartial, and, in its own
way, understandable. Today, with those dragons a quickly fading memory, we find that there are new,
different battles to be fought and won. These battles, the people battles, are much harder to understand and
combat. But, understand and combat them we must, if we are to win the war in the end.
