To be truly accountable to your clients, identify their needs

Information Outlook, Feb, 2005 by Sue Henczel

Effective information services are those that accurately meet the needs of their client bases. Identifying and satisfying your clients' needs are critical to the viability of your service. Any library or information unit manager who is unable to demonstrate how the products and services they provide (and the organization pays for) support not only the work of their clients but the overall achievements of the organization is risking the future of their job--and the library services within their organization.

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For information services to be seen as anything other than overhead, we must understand that we can only say we are fully satisfying our clients needs when our clients say that we are--it must be from their perspective and not from ours. The delivery of information products and services must also be reflected in an improvement in, or in the visible support of, the achievement of organizational objectives.

As information professionals we continue to make assumptions about what people need. We cite many reasons, including, but not limited to:

* Our LIS education that has taught us that if we are to be "good" librarians we must provide particular products and services--and we often continue to provide them without questioning their relevance to our clients

* Pressure from vendors who insist that our clients need their products

* Assuming that we know more about the information needs of our clients than they do

* Continuing to provide particular products and services because those products and services have always been provided.

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In order to establish what products and services are required, we must know not only what information products and services our clients need to do their jobs, but also what they do with the information we provide to them and how that contributes to organizational success.

By understanding why the information is needed we can accurately define and prioritize our products and services (and consequently our resources and budgets) and define how the information must be packaged to be most useful. We can also identify those tasks or business processes that are supported by information we provide and rate the criticality of the information to the successful completion of the task or process. This is invaluable when promoting the service as a core corporate function rather than overhead.

Needs analyses and information audits are both processes that identify the needs of information users. Both are research processes--and that is where the commonality ends. They differ markedly in what they aim to do, how they are conducted, and how their findings can be applied. As research processes they both comprise data gathering, analysis, and evaluation components.

They rely on surveys to gather data with questionnaires, interviews (personal and group), and focus groups being the most common methods used. The gathered data is analyzed and then the analyzed data is evaluated (to determine what it means) and interpreted (to determine what it means within the context of the organization). The evaluated data is used to develop recommendations that are then validated and reported. The recommendations feed into immediate changes and short- and long-term planning processes.

The needs analysis process asks information users what information products and services they need to do their jobs. It results in a list of "desired" products and services (from the perspective of the information user). It may also ask how important each item is (also from the perspective of the information user) which enables the items to be prioritized.

An information audit asks information users what information products and services they need to do their jobs, what the information is used for, and how it is used. It covers what they currently have and do not have, where they get what they use and where it goes after use, what information resources they create and where those information resources go after creation. It links the tasks and activities of each business unit, division, department, or section with the information required to support it.

To compare the two processes: A needs analysis gathers data that enables an information service to provide those items that the information users say they need. It is often a "wish list"' and its success relies heavily on the information user knowing which resources are available. The information users are only able to request those resources that they know about, which does not guarantee that they are using the most relevant resources. Further work on the findings of a needs analysis, however, enables an evaluation of whether the resources they ask for are the "best" or most "relevant" for their needs. It is conducted over a relatively short timeframe, is relatively inexpensive.

An information audit gathers data that enables an information service to provide the most relevant information for a specified function in a way that best suits how the resource is used. It enables the resources to be rated according to their importance to the process they support as well as to the achievement of organizational objectives. An information audit is a major project that can take months to complete and consequently requires the commitment of significant resources.