Stay ahead of the curve

Information Outlook, May, 2005 by John R. Latham

If I come out of a presentation or seminar with at least two ideas to follow up on or a couple statements that inspire me, I leave a happy man. I cannot promise that I actually act on any of them, but I am full of good intentions, and they are there for future reference.

At a recent presentation on What Associations Can Learn from Google, given at SLA headquarters by Jeff De Cagna of Principled Innovation Inc. (www.principledinnovation.com), two sentences stuck in my mind: "Why are we always reacting to crises or traumas?" and "Change has to be part of your culture, as we do not know when the S curve is going to go down." The latter was a reference to the Sigmoid curve, which is not an invasive medical procedure but a graph with a horizontal S that shows that success is cyclical. Both these concerns can be applied to our information centers and to organizations in general, and they can both be addressed by staying ahead of the curve.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having to react to crises in the organization or traumatic requests from users. They will never go away. But if you or your staff are regularly dropping everything to deal with crises, it's time to analyze why this is happening. By definition, if an exception happens regularly, it is no longer an exception but is becoming the rule. The problem can arise because the nature of the organization is changing or the working style or environment of your users is changing. The latter is clearly true because of the technological changes that have affected how users find information. The former is not so easy to detect, as organizational change is often a slow process.

When Is There a Problem?

How do you determine that there may be a problem, and what can you do about it? You are likely to have a problem if the time available to prepare your core products or services is significantly reduced and the quality of the services is affected. It is easy to say that there is never time to do the job as well as one could or would like to, but one generally knows when the level of service is dropping. If this happens, it's time to look at the mission and goals of your information organization and see if they need revising. At the same time, look at the mission of the whole organization and consider whether your services are still completely relevant. This is when the networking you have done throughout the organization pays off: Chatting with managers in different areas, especially if they don't use your services, can provide useful insights into how the organization is changing and where it is moving.

We all do the best possible job with limited resources, which makes it even more important to set aside time to look at the products and services we provide. Find time to have a brainstorming session with your staff or, if you are a solo, with a colleague or mentor, and justify every service or product, however fundamental it might seem to be to your mission. This process is a lot easier if change is part of the organization's culture; if not, change can still become the culture of the information center.

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The other side of the coin is addressing the S curve--making changes on the rising curve of quality and effectiveness. In many ways, this is a more difficult issue to address. If it's not broke, do you need to fix it? Even if your organization does not appear to be adapting to its market, which is highly unlikely, the way employees do business almost certainly will change. How are these changes going to affect the information services you provide and your users need? You may have to adapt the delivery of a current product or service rather than create new ones. If you have a system through which you regularly receive feedback from users, review the feedback and see if a trend of changing requirements is developing. Or have your users fill out a short survey on the effectiveness of the information center's products and services, making sure to provide space for their wish list of services if money and staffing were not issues. Nothing should be considered too far out.

It may be stating the obvious, but we sometimes forget to give our users what they want, not just what they, or we, think they need. This came home to me recently when a friend who had recently changed jobs told me that in her "getting to know you" process, she found that the users rated the quality of the products and services delivered by the information center as excellent, but they were not getting the services they really wanted.

It is crucial that we remain relevant and, we hope, indispensable in our organizations. To do so, we need to regularly step back and assess our services and make sure we stay ahead of the curve.

John R. Latham is the director of the SLA Information Center. He can be reached at jlatham@sla.org.