The 5 Levels of IT Resistance

Tom's latest eBook has been released on Amazon: "The 7 Myths of IT Integrations". Tom is also a Program Director for a large Midwest corporation and has been an adjunct faculty member at Walsh College. He has managed global web initiatives, data center moves and large multi-million dollar programs.

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I was swapping experiences with a colleague the other day about the different challenges of managing and consulting in a corporate IT environment. I have known this guy for quite a while, but he had some new observations that I thought were interesting: “Whenever we’ve tried something new or a tried a different approach in a corporate IT environment, I always ran into the same excuses. I’ve learned to gauge how close I am to being successful by where I am in the excuse scale.”

I asked him what he meant. “Corporate IT environments have layers of defenses against doing anything differently. You have to progressively work through each obstacle to keep your idea or suggestion moving. I call them the five levels of resistance. It’s one of the secrets to getting things done,” he said.

The 5 Levels of Corporate IT Resistance
Let’s say, for sake of argument, that you are experiencing intermittent problems with a commercial software product. Let’s also assume the outage is driven by some type of memory condition with a particular function. The vendor doesn’t acknowledge the memory leak as a problem. Let’s also say that by sifting through some online tech forums, you also discover that a setting made to the operating system of the server can alleviate much of the symptoms that the users are noticing.

You …

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