How to Push Back Against Infogov Push-Back

We’ve all been there –

• You know what you want to do to fix your information quality and process issues
• You talked it up for months, up and down the org chart, and you got what you thought was a clear go-ahead
• But when you actually starting doing things, you got so much push-back – “we don’t have the time, the budget, the resources” – that you couldn’t do ANYTHING. At least not without revisiting your entire approach.

I bring this up because in just the past several months, I heard 3 different stories from people going through exactly this – two of whom ended up taking their talents elsewhere.

While voting with your feet is always an option, there are cards you can play before you go that far. There isn’t room here to go over them in any useful detail, but I can give you the key to each one:

Always stay focused on the business problem you’re trying to solve, be it:

• Disposing of records stored in the wrong places
• Fully implementing retention against records in the right places
• Standardizing policies across the organization
• Or what have you

Even if you have to give up a certain level of detail to counter the objections, you probably can still address the issues on the table, at least to some degree. And amidst all the angst and frustration, that’s the thing to keep in mind.

Whether you find that worth the pain and suffering you may have to endure, well, that’s another question. But you’ll at least be able to show your powers-that-be that you’ve done everything within YOUR power to get the job done. And sometimes, that’s enough to effectively push back against the push-back and get the ball rolling.