Leadership in the post-hierarchical library - The Library Director

Library Trends, Summer, 1994 by Richard T. Sweeney

Processes are complicated because they involve many types of customers, activities, technologies, variables, and inputs. Effective processes, even though complicated, are logical and therefore can be represented graphically as flow charts. Not every flow chart is a work process, however. Critical activities of a process can often be either intentionally or unintentionally hidden. This makes the process analysis much more complex. The leader must probe deeply into each process in order to determine what actually occurs.

Processes are also complicated because they involve people whose needs and motivations vary considerably. Employees are people who perform the activities of the process. Vendors, funding agents, and other suppliers of external inputs to the processes, also involve people. The most important part of process redesign and leadership are the relationships with all the people involved. These relationships can be either supported or diminished by the organizational structure.

Individual tasks or activities in a work process are not sacred; only the complete process and its impact upon the customer matters. The success of a single activity is best judged by its direct effect upon the customer. In other words, an improvement to a single activity is useless if it does not greatly improve the end result of the process to the customer. Processes are completely driven by their value to customers which means delivering higher quality library service with fewer resources than the customer or funding agent expected. Results matter more than the specific tasks or activities of the process.

Do small advances and incremental process improvements add up to greatly improved processes? Not necessarily. Some so-called advances and fine tuning can improve a part of a process without influencing customer satisfaction. Other small advances may result in only modest improvements in customer satisfaction. Some steps simply have a greater impact upon customer satisfaction than others. In some cases, a certain combination of tasks must be improved to greatly improve customer satisfaction. It is not always obvious or intuitive how to make great improvements in customer satisfaction. For example, the activity of choosing an automated circulation system is not reengineering. No matter how well accomplished, it becomes reengineering only if it results in radical customer service improvement. Often the specific benefits of choosing an automated circulation system do not typically bring radical improvements in service, they simply change the method of record keeping.

Traditional library departments often measure performance of a process on a task-by-task basis or on an input basis rather than on customer satisfaction. Job descriptions, for example, are often written to include sample duties or tasks instead of identifying the basic process performed and the statement of who will be served.

Suppose that a library concentrates upon building a CD-ROM tower on a network so that users can remotely search a special index of journal articles. Can the process be greatly improved if the library is not able to deliver the articles indexed and located by users in a timely fashion? Of course not. Users still may have to go to the library and physically try to obtain the journal articles. In very few cases can the user both search and obtain the articles remotely. The user will be frustrated with remote access to the citations (CD-ROM) without the same access to the articles. In this example, the process is the collection of tasks which permits a user to search remotely and retrieve the necessary information--i.e., the articles. The CD-ROM network may seem like a great achievement to librarians, but it does not vastly improve the user process--i.e., obtaining articles on a subject. The CD-ROM system does greatly reduce the amount of searching time when compared to hard-copy indexes. It certainly results in user benefits but not in complete user satisfaction. In short, it is not reengineering.