[off-topic] how to "sell" GIS idea?

[Bill Binko]

For a bit more GIS-specific answer, I have used the following explanation 
to convince a director here of the value of GIS.  He is fairly 
non-technical, so it did take a few attempts, but now it's great to see 
him regurgitate it :)

Most managers understand the value of a relational database, even if they 
don't know how they work.  They understand that you can link information 
in this table with information in that table if they have a common ID and 
that you can create summaries by State/Province, or by Product Group.

Within that context, explain that GIS adds the ability to link information
based on location.  GIS gives you the ability to summarize based on new
concepts like "near this office" or "within 3 miles of a Redwood stand".

The easiest GIS app to explain (for me) has been PostGIS: they understand 
what a database is, and they are willing to accept the concept of "a 
description of the location or shape is stored as a field."  You add the 
basic operators like "intersects" "within" and "distance" and you'll see 
an amazing response.

Every time I've explained this to a business person, I've stayed with it 
until they said something like, "Hey!  That means I could....[find all of 
the homes on circular lakes that are good for waterskiing or some such 
nonsense]".  They rapidly figure out ways to use the concept once you 
present the benefits.

Open Source (in this case) is a fairly easy sell.  The closed-source 
solutions are very pricey, and if you stick to a web-based presentation 
layer, there is no need to distribute your modifications outside your 
organization.  That means there's no issues with GPL problems that some 
companies have.  Of course, you should tell them that you plan to push 
back fixes and improvements that you find, but usually, proprietary 
information in GIS is in the data, not the code.

I hope this helps

Bill

> 
> Eduardo Patto Kanegae wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > Recently one customer asked me a hard favor: to sell GIS ideas to the 
> > president's company!
> > 
> > For me , this is very hard to do, because "presidents" normally knows 
> > *business* language, not GIS-language
> > or IT-languages .
> > 
> > What we are trying to do basically is to *sell* the creation of a new 
> > department inside the company. The company
> > is the forestry division of a pulp-n-paper brazilian insdustry.
> > 
> > the main goal of this new proposed department is
> > to create, test and prototype GIS solutions for the forestry day to day 
> > operations. ( and of course,
> > my contribution here is help them to do it only using FOSS solutions... 
> > or as much as possible :-).
> > so, HOW to do it will not be the problem.
> > 
> > My real problem is: "how to SELL GIS benefits, but NOT using technical 
> > terms?"
> > 
> > does anybody recommend any links or bibliography?
> > 
> > best regards.
> > 
> 
>