GIS managers traditionally consider three perspectives of the nature of GIS when introducing GIS into an organization. When the GIS is developed to address focused and well defined problems of the organization, these perspectives adequately describe the changing identities of GIS in the study of its diffusion. However when the GIS is developed to address strategic, but vaguely defined problems, as typically is the case of a corporate GIS, these perspectives are inadequate for describing it. Therefore a new perspective is developed for the corporate GIS and the significance of the new perspective on GIS diffusion research is discussed.