How to help Perl in your organization?

On YAPC::EU there were several talks with a common theme, how Perl is successfully used in large corporate or governmental environments such as Cisco, UBS - the Swiss bank, the Geneva courts, Opera Software and more.

The common theme was that in none of the cases was Perl suggested by management. Moreover in many cases there were reasonable forces internally that wanted to use something else.

Nevertheless the in-house Perl agent managed to convince the right people that Perl is the right tool to write the applications.

In contrast we see many cases where Perl is declared as something that you cannot use for the project. For example the recent post of Todd Presta The Wings of Perlception in which he describes how in his workplace Perl is considered "evil" and is not considered to some web application. Instead of that they are talking about either Java or PHP.

Maybe it is too late for this specific project but how could Todd make a change in the attitude?

Manual for field agents on how to promote Perl

I talked to some of the speakers during YAPC about the need of some kind of a help for all the Perl agents in the corporate environment - such as Todd. Some kind of a manual on how to promote Perl. I talked to them as it seems they all had various tools to bring Perl into a position in the organization where it is an accepted or even approved language for development. So they could be the best people to help put together a set of white papers or ideas on how to improve the position of Perl in an organization.

So what do you suggest, what are the tricks one can employ to improve the position of Perl in his own organization?

Links to the presentations I mentioned earlier: Perl in Cisco by Sue Spence, How Opera Software uses Perl by Cosimo Streppone, Banking on Perl by Paul Johnson and Managing Geneva courts of law, from Cobol to Perl by Laurent Dami.