One of the things I found out early on was was that decision makers often ignore data in favor of their pre-existing desires and prejudices.

I created a fairly detailed analysis once that showed that replacing our main VAX server with a new server would save about $200,000 over the first 3 years, and that the net cash flow would be positive from day one. Basically, it would result is a savings in cash from day one, and would generate a large labor performance improvement because the old system was so overloaded that people were spending far more time doing their work than they should be.

I thought this would be a no brainer because the reduction in monthly maintenance cost on the current system would be greater than the lease cost for the new system.

My proposal was immediately bogged down with emotional counter arguments: “Shouldn’t we be moving to UNIX?” “Why don’t we just let end-users do everyting on PCs with spreadsheets?” “This is just IT wasting money that we should be spending in my department”

We eventually went forward with the proposal, but not until there was a major turnover in decision makers.

Since then, I always try to make sure that I understand the emotional context of the decision makers and make sure my proposals fit their prejudices along with having hard financial analysis support. Of course the danger of playing to their emotions is that I may get them to make a financially bad decision, so I try to make sure the data really supports it, and that I am not pushing my own prejudices.