- One of the biggest challenges facing our industry is resistance to change.
- Managing socio-technical change in organizations has been well researched and documented.
- Mandates and the “team of 2” are important concepts for breaking through the barriers.
In listening to the presentations last week at Spar 2009 I think the number one theme that I heard was the resistance to change that the early adopters are finding when they attempt to spread the laser scanning gospel into organizations. Their are many textbooks written on this subject. Do a search under the heading of managing socio-technical change in organizations, and you will see what I mean.
No need to reinvent the wheel here. The same challenges faced the early adopters of GIS – geographic information systems technology.
One of the key concepts that came out of the early days of consultants working with organizations struggling with getting the necessary support to make large investments in GIS was establishing a mandate. A lot of time and money can be wasted attempting to get people and organizations to change organically. If you can get a mandate established within an organization that laser scanning is required then things will change a lot faster. As we heard last week this is what has occurred with the GSA’s 3D-4D-BIM program.
Over the years ESRI has become skilled at having their GIS software established as the standard in an organization. A recent press release indicated that the State of Oregon recently passed a law establishing ESRI technology as the standard in all state agencies. Now that’s what I call a mandate.
A second guiding principle concerning organizational change that I always recall came from internal customer research conducted by ESRI. Essentially they asked their best customers what was the number reason for them being successful when so many other organizations were struggling with implementing GIS. Turns out it was what they called “the team of 2”.
Those organizations that had the most success were lead by a technical person and someone who could mange the politics – the team of 2. That is what was the number 1 common success factor. When faced with getting a customer to adopt laser scanning as the new way of doing business try to identify the team of 2, and while your at it see if you can get a mandate.
