What are some of the ways that you have overcome resistance to change when implementing new aspects of the ArcGIS Platform?

Question

Resistance to change is natural.  People are not always eager to jump to the newest version or utilizing new capability that might change their workflows.

What are some of the ways that you have overcome that resistance to change in order to get a high adoption rate to new parts of the ArcGIS Platform? changemanagement

MichaelGreen · Answer

From what I have seen, a lot of people take the "long" route of waiting for others to see the value in the work completed by spatial analytics.  In these times of faster paced technology innovation and business oriented outcomes that technology must address, it may not be the best path to wait.

When GIS leaders clearly articulate the benefits of the outcome from their work to be in alignment with their executive leadership's goals and visions, a faster moving drive for results emerges.  That is when employing people focused change management principles can accelerate adoption and executive sponsorship that is desired and expected.

The value of planning for people focused activities conducted at the same time as the planning phase for a technology implementation project allows change leaders to:

* proactively address resistance by leveraging the influence of leadership
* coordinate impactful communication by both the executive leadership and the managers who need to influence their team members
* execute training timed to supports user's needs when the technology becomes live

More customers have recently initiated a modernization effort similar to ones described by Robert.  What I hope to learn is how customers are both planning ahead for their system architecture to meet the future needs of a Web GIS and the planning for the people focused activities that insure people are ready to embrace and use a new capability.  More and more customers are seeing the need to drive their adoption efforts, not just organically expand capability over time.

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RobertBorchert · Answer

That's exactly it.

For us it was a long process. It took a few years to really get more and more people on board. Now it is to the point where we have to migrate to Portal to handle all the necessary users.

We are having to entirely restructure our database and the way everything is laid out with streamline feature services etc.

One of the big mistakes many companies make when growing is they spin this up for this person, spin this up for that person.  And before you know it you don't have a lot of standardization

JoeBorgione · Answer

This is the take-away for me:  To get people to accept and use the new technology you get them to ask  you for it.

Great comments Robert!

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