Again learning from manufacturing companies, it is important to do the conceptual design with an integrated team. The history of cross-functional GIS development was not always a very happy one. We cannot assume that just because there is a loosely shared common interest that cooperation automatically follows. It is significantly easier for people in different functions to cooperate if they really understand the need and rationale for information in other departments. The difficulty lies in the fact that even today in many organizations the GIS team is the first and only place this is tried.
Real success depends on the whole corporate culture.
Traditionally the cooperation, say, between the engineering department and the assessor office, or between the planning office and the election people, was not characterized by the spontaneous cooperation we find among the birds which supported Cinderella. An investment in team training and related skills can be extremely helpful. Regardless of how little talent or inclination the primary collector has to do the data updating job, it is the challenge of the systems designer to design a system so easy to use as to make the process fail-proof. The important thing to remember is that this is the stage with the one and only chance to design quality into the system and ease the burden on corrective maintenance actions. When selecting a system, we always have the best intentions.