PrintWhile the growth of and increase in the capabilities of geospatial applications has been explosive, the extent to which we satisfy a customer is still dependent on a number of other factors including employee education, training, the material and cultural work environments, job satisfaction, compensation, growth opportunity, the effectiveness of business processes, as well as the very structure of the organizations in which it all functions. Without a doubt, inspired, effective people remain one of the principal factors in any business. It is people that envision and implement strategy, interpret information into products and services; master business processes and create value for customers and shareholders alike. It should seem obvious that technology in general, and geospatial technologies more specifically, are affected by organizational factors.
Why then are we not more aware of the importance of the organizational framework in which we implement a geospatial technology? There are several possible reasons. First, the topic of the organizational structures seldom appears on the radar screen of the geospatial professional. The geospatial professional is typically so preoccupied with the technical and analytical challenges of day-to-day operations that the opportunity to study the social and the related organizational aspects is often lost. Second, the prevailing ideas of organizational, and therefore the related social, structure are institutionalized in our traditional management hierarchies of layered control and decision making. These multiple layers of management structure are the result of the same kind of functional orientation also present in models of mass production and military-like command and control organizations.
Keen’s 1981 article is a classic in the field of information systems. The age of the article notwithstanding, it is highly relevant today and in the realm of geospatial technology. The point here is that geospatial technology failures are commonly the result of non-technical defects; so a geospatial technology failure is more often to be a social outcome.