The one where we streamline the holiday library

It is 2pm in the small public library of Holidayville (name changed to protect the innocent) and I am silently humming Van Halen's "Top of the world" while wearing my "Solo librarians rock!" t-shirt. I never like taking holidays, as I never know what happens in my library when I am not there. Heaven forbid a non-library certified bozo puts a monograph in the serials section or classifies a confidential document with public access. But according to Hades' corporate policy, I have to take my vacation days.

So I have taken my precautions before going on holiday. The physical library is guarded by my passive aggressive assistant Sue. Her favorite word is "no" and she hates lending out things or doing l-users (library users) favors. Last year Sue took a course in customer service from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) University, the same fine university that teaches the security agents on airports how to be customer focused. Sue especially enjoyed the courses "Humor - why it should avoided at all times", "How to stare down customers" and "Showing your commitment by stamping formsaggressively".

So the physical library should be safe. I have also revoked every one's permissions on both the intranet and the records management system. Sure, things will pile up in my absence, but I am not taking my chances by having stuff submitted or changed unsupervised. We all know these l-users will go completely nuts without proper librarian supervision. My manager asked me: how will we handle problems that arise in your absence? Well, I am of the conviction that most problems will go away when ignored long enough. So during my holiday, I told my boss to either ignore the problem or ask people to submit a complaint form via the intranet (which will go straight to bit-heaven). If problems are still around when I get back, I will take over and ignore them.

As hardcore librarian, I cannot imagine a life without books, information or shushing people. Therefore I have chosen my holiday very carefully. I was lucky to find a very small holiday resort which offers peace, nature and yes, a public library run by a solo librarian. I made a deal with the librarian there that I will fill in while she goes on a "monographs and serials claiming masterclass" cruise in the Caribbean.

The public library is small, cosy and offers many services for the different groups in Holidayville. On my first day, the library was closed so I had time to review all the collections, services and policy documents. It was clear to me that this library needed to be run more like a bureaucratic, complex and power hungry organisation in order to compete in today's economy. Luckily I have experience in that area.

So I started by putting up inspirational posters around the library. Some of my favorites are "Blame - the secret to success is knowing who to blame for your failures", "Apathy - if we don't take care of the customer, maybe they will stop bugging us" and "Respect - let's agree to respect each others views, no matter how wrong or stupid yours may be".

I also reviewed the services and cut over half of them that did not score as stars or cash cows on the Boston Consultancy Group Matrix.
Then I started to rewrite the remaining services, starting with the children's story hour, which had potential to be just more than me reading a story to the kids. I clearly believe children are our future, so they should learn at an early age that life is not about fun & playing, it's about targets, skills and using your elbows.

So as of now, the story hour will start by a clear overview of the learning objectives of the story hour which are clearly linked to the mission statement of the library. Every selected story will start with a motivational video about the topic, after which I will go around the group asking everyone to make a pledge to contribute towards the story hours objectives. After the story has been told, the group of kids will be split into focus groups, each with cleardeliverables to submit after an hour. The deliverables will be linked to the size of ice cream as a bonus.
At the end of the day, the story hour will be evaluated by performing an after action review, which enables me to update the story hour best practice database.


(The story hour improvement ideas was inspired by a story during Dave Snowden's presentation at the SLA 2008 conference)

Disclaimer: this post and all others are the product of the authors' imagination and any resemblance to real situations is purely bad luck. This article does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my friends, or my sock puppet. Do not write below this line. Don't quote me on that. Don't quote me on anything.

Summer holiday

Just a short message to say posting will resume late August when I am back from summer holiday. I've got an all inclusive holiday planned and volunteered to take shifts in the small public library of the holiday village. Should be fun. For me at least.

The one where we thrive on organisational complexity

It is almost 2.15 in the library and I am checking my e-mail while enjoying the fabulous live album of the lovely Dana Fuchs. My specially designed "management fluff" spam filter has already deleted the growing amount of e-mails from all kinds of managers, who all of a sudden feel like they should communicate more with staff.

The CEO started this trend and after that every management layer wanted to chip in their views, notes, letters and drivel. I especially hate the e-mails from management which are intended to start a change. It's almost like management thinks: "well, instead of doing all this expensive change management, why don't I just send out an inspirational e-mail telling people that they should change. They will immediately see my point and become 'change agents'". To be clear - I don't have a problem with management as long as they don't interfere with my work.

Now one e-mail has fooled the filter, a message urging all of us to "decomplexify" our way of working. Is that a even word?

Mmmm, a nice e-mail from my library protege asking for advice about how to deal with organisational complexity. Well, I have always loved organisational complexity - it offers so many advantages. Let me explain.

Instead of reporting to one boss, I have a departmental manager to whom I report hierarchically but I get my steer from a committee consisting of representatives of all the major library user groups. Establishing this committee was one of the best ideas I ever had. Since the committee spans business divisions, regions and timezones - most of the committee members don't know each other or even talk to each other.

Whenever a difficult problem comes up that I can really do without, I sent it to the committee. Usually they meet via teleconference once a month with me as chair, but most of the times not enough committee members attend to make the decision valid as agreed by the committee decision making rules (wonder who wrote those rules?). That then gives me the excuse that I am "on top of the issue", but unfortunately the committee hasn't decided yet. Shift the blame, baby.

It is always good to pit my departmental manager against the committee: "Well boss, that indeed is a great idea - but I need the full buy in from the library steering committee of course". Can you spell d-e-l-a-y?

Just as a precaution, I have also developed a great relationship with the chief operating officer (COO). It all started out when I started feeding him the internal gossip spreading across the company via instant messaging. As a legal precaution, all chat sessions are recorded and stored in my lovely records management system. And guess what - I get to do random checks on records to see whether they meet the required retention classification. In the rare case the library steering committee almost reaches a decision which clearly is the wrong one, for example "why don't we reduce the budget" or "we need more granular usage statistics" I sigh and remark that the COO had a completely opposing opinion when I spoke to him yesterday at the golf club. That's usually enough to nip a problem in the bud.

If needed I can also throw in the smoke screen of different project managers. I always try to be on different projects for different parts of the organization. It is always great fun to spark a discussion between the library steering committee, my departmental manager and a project manager via e-mail. I just like to send them all an e-mail once in a while like "I will take my annual summer leave next month, what are the priorities I should wrap up before then?". Then it's nice to sit back with a cup of relaxing tea and watch the flurry of e-mails fly by...

Last but not least, I always ask for road maps, vision documents and agreed deliverables before even considering a decision above the level of "what font type should I use on the library meeting minutes template?". Managers love that type of questions and huddle in plush meeting rooms for a while, leaving me alone to get stuff done. Once they come back, I throw in the word that will scare them into making any kind of major decision: I ask for funding.


Disclaimer: this post and all others are the product of the authors' imagination and any resemblance to real situations is purely bad luck. This article does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my friends, or my World of Warcraft avatar. Do not write below this line. Don't quote me on that. Don't quote me on anything.

Poll: you've read the blog, what about a book?

For all my three readers out there:

I've been looking into the options to retire early. One of the options under consideration is to turn the blog into a real book (you know, the ones made of dead trees) and hope someone will buy it by mistake.
Before I do the whole stakeholder analysis, market scan and start bribing book reviewers - are you even interested in buying this blog as a real book? (don't be shy, I am not asking for a commitment, just your opinion ;-)

Let me know in the comments. I'll owe you a drink.

The one where we team up with the lawyer

It is nearly 4pm in the library on a cloudy Tuesday and the legendary "Journey - Live in Houston 1981" concert in the superb 5.1 surround sound mix is blasting through the library. Yeah, "Who's crying now".... or should I say "Keep onrunnin'" regarding the situation that I had to deal with earlier today...

It all started last week when the phone rang, with "private number" in the caller id display. Which in itself is not a good sign. Either it is a user who wants to stay anonymous. Usually they will call because they want something that they should be perfectly capable of doing themselves. And if they cannot do it themselves, they should not want it in the first place. Some may say I am not user focused, I say I am managing demand.

And if it's not a user whining about something or the other, it is someone from outside our company who distracts me from my mission to dominate the world. So I picked up the phone and immediately disconnected the call. Usually that gives a clear signal to the calling party that yes, I am here, but no, I don't want to talk to you. But the phone rang again within 30 seconds.Geez. Now I've completely lost my train of thought of my movie script to turn my unauthorised biography of Melvil Dewey into a miniseries ("The Melvil Dewey story - the drama, the suspense and the classification scheme").

"Yeah. Library here. Waddaya want?"

"Is this the Hades Corporate Library?"

"Perhaps. Who are you?"

"My name is Randy Goodrem, vice senior sales account executive for Business Executive World News. I assume you are familiar with our valuable, world famous, must-have industry news source?"

"I think I did a trial a while ago... but then you guys send me a proposal that was completely insane. So no, we're still not interested. Bye."

"Hang on, that is not the reason why I am calling. I wanted to ask you where to send the invoice for the trial"

"Excuse me - the invoice for the trial? You guys told me it was a free two week trial!"

"Aah, well. The trial is indeed free up to 15 downloads. After that we charge you, which is clearly stated in our terms of use at the bottom of the front page in the tiny, almost grey font on the white background. Just below the huge blinking banner. It's only visible on your first visit, but basically by using the site you acknowledge to our terms and conditions."

"You're kidding me!"

"No sir, either you pay us $15.000 for the trial or you sign up for an annual, global subscription in which case we deduct that amount from your subscription fee"

"Randy, listen - you don't think I even WANT to do business with you guys now?"

"Well, I must say that most of your peers immediately saw the win-win situation and have now signed up to our platinum corporate subscription. So I assume you are at least as clever as them. Otherwise I see no other way than to sue you."

(smoke coming out of my ears)
"Sue me? I'm gonna sue you! Do you know who you are dealing with???"

"Take it easy, mister librarian. Let me come over to your offices next week to come to an agreement. I am sure we can work out a deal where you sign a lousy contract, which results in a huge bonus for me and you then have access to our superb, must-have industry news website."

So we arranged for a meeting in our offices. Mr. Randy Goodrem clearly did not know that nobody messes with the obnoxious librarian. Because the obnoxious librarian plays golf with the ferocious lawyer. PeterBurkman Jr. III is one of the top lawyers at Hades, defending us against all the unjustified lawsuits. Burkman Jr. III (I can call him "the Burkmeister ") then flies with the corporate jet to the other side of the world to defend our company and then counter sue the poor bastards. We quickly found out that my power over information and his legal master brain made a great combination. Many times I have been able to supply him with some smoking gun documents to win a case, so I can now ask for a favor.

I call the Burkmeister on his cell phone and find out he is currently defending us in a 2 gazillion lawsuit in Australia. When I explain my case to him he laughs out loud: "Oh great, this is gonna be fun... some sales schmuck trying to rip us off and not knowing whom he is dealing with. I will get my secretary to reschedule my calendar and I'll bring this sales weasel to his knees."

So this morning the Burkmeister was sitting in our fanciest meeting room, with his back to the window. Opposite of him we put the most uncomfortable chair we could find, which was at the lowest level possible. So mr. Goodrem would not only have to sqiunt his eyes against the sun behind the Burkmeister, but he would also have to look up to him.
When mr. Goodrem arrived, we let him wait for 40 minutes at reception while we were swapping lawyer jokes. I then went to pick up Mr. Goodrem and brought him to the meeting room. The Burkmeister was talking on the phone and did not acknowledge us. Mr. Goodrem walked up to him and held out his hand - ready to shake the Burkmeister's hand. But he waved dismissively to mr. Goodrem and continued his phonecall. After 5 minutes, the Burkmeister put down his phone and looked mr. Goodrem straight in the eye with a sigh:

"Well. I had expected a more worthy opponent. But ok - you're here. I am a very busy man and I need to be out of here in 10 minutes. I understand you are wrongly accusing our corporate librarian. Why?"

"As clearly stated on our website"

"Clearly? Clearly? mr Goodrem, you and I both know that unless the user confirms that he agrees to your conditions, your outrageous claim has no ground. You have no case. You have no case. You have nothing."

"But our terms of use"

"Your terms of use are a pile of drivel and the only thing that is clear to me is that your company is trying to scam innocent, hardworking librarians into signing licenses. Are we done now?"

"but.. but... if you don't pay, we will have to sue you!"

"HA! Do you know how many lawsuits I have handled for Hades Corporation in the past year? 150. And how many did I win? 300. Because in every case I counter-sued and won that case as well. Mr. Goodrem, let me put this straight - you will apologize to my dear colleague the librarian here and then I will count to 10. I don't want to ever see you again and neither do I want to hear from your company every again. Otherwise I will bury you in lawsuits and my librarian here will rally his library gang to disrupt every public event of your company. And believe me, you don't want to have a group of rowdy librarians turning against you."

And just to have something to cheer me up later, I videotaped the whole meeting. Would it be too obnoxious to upload a copy to YouTube and then submit the link to a few library blogs?


Disclaimer: this post and all others are the product of the authors' imagination and any resemblance to real situations is purely bad luck. This article does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my friends, or my invisible friend. Brands mentioned are not endorsed by me, but merely tolerated. Don't quote me on that. Don't quote me on anything.

The one where we become a status symbol

It is Friday evening, 10pm and I am back in the library where I haven't been for a week. I have put "Mess of blues" of the late Jeff Healey on the sound system and walk around the library, happy to be back between the books, bound journals and humming servers. It has been a roller coaster week....

Exactly a week ago I was ready to leave for a long weekend when the phone rang. The extension that showed up was "CEO office", which seemed strange to me. Being at the bottom end of the food chain, I was rarely called by the powers that be in the plush offices. Curiously, I picked up the phone.

"Yeah, library here - make it quick - I need to be home on time to watch the documentary about the unknown, yet crucial role of the Dewey classification in the underground secret information sharing during WWII."

"Mr. Librarian. This is Gil R. Moralious speaking, I am chairing the committee to select a new CEO for Hades Corp, as you may know."

"Gil, that's great - you are considering me for the job, I assume?"

"No, Mr. Librarian. Unfortunately that is not the case. I am however calling you regarding a promotion which I am sure you would be interested in. I just looked at your career so far in Hades Corp, and found out that in all your years with our exciting company you have always worked in the same role, in the same low level job group."

"Well, Gil, this "exciting" company really does not have a career path for librarians - but of course I am more motivated by challenging projects, stimulating intellectual peer groups and the utter fulfillment of working for Hades."

"Then you are the right person for the new job that just opened today, which will offer a unique career perspective in a challenging top level environment where you will constantly encounter paradigm shifts. You will be the strategic information enabler, facilitating top executive knowledge interchanges."

"Ok, Gil, let's cut the crap - what is this all about?"

"Mr. Librarian, we have identified the ideal candidate for the future of Hades. In utmost confidence I am revealing to you that we are about to appoint Prof. Dr. Joyce Fedizko MBA BWG III Jr as our new CEO. As you will know, Mrs. Fedizko is one of the world's leading CEOs who has single- handedly revolutionized the coffee sweetener, paper clip and stuffed animal industry. We are convinced she will bring Hades Corp back into the top quartile market position. However, she is a tough negotiator. We have already tripled her current salary, offered her a custom designed Lamborghini and exclusive use of the company LearJet. Yet, she wants more. She wants to become the world's most exclusive CEO and is now asking for the next CEO status symbol: a personal librarian."

"Huh?"

"Yes, apparently Mrs. Fedizko was bragging about our offer to her CEO peers earlier this week on the golf course. Bill Gates was not impressed, as he revealed to her that he has a personal librarian. She now considers this the prime fringe benefit. So we looked in our files, and as you are the only librarian in Hades, we would like you to become the CPL - Chief Personal Librarian."

Of course, there was a catch. I would assume the new position immediately, but the talent enabling department (formerly know as HR) could not for some reason put me in a higher pay grade. That would however be solved with the right number of forms, signatures and secret handshakes.

So on Monday morning I started my new career as CPL. After my acceptance, Mrs. Fedizko had accepted the Hades' offer and sent her instructions to the interior design department. They worked all weekend with my guidance to remodel two existing meeting rooms on the top floor into a smaller copy of the old British Library circa 1904. So think antique book shelves, leather chairs, golden railings and copies of DaVinci drawings.
I was given an obscene book budget to acquire first edition, rare and signed editions of books. Also, Mrs. Fedizko had her personal collection shipped to me, existing of signed biographies from every important head of state, business hot shot and celebrity she ever met.

It was like a dream come true, this superb collection and only ONE potential customer. Who would travel all over the world and hardly be around to disturb the tranquil silence in the library.

The other great part about the job description was being present during selected strategic meetings, feeding Mrs. Fedizko with vital information. I would sit next to her in the top level suite with my laptop. Whenever someone else started talking, I would quickly pull up relevant information via the information sources available at my fingertips. With a distinguished thumbs down I could indicate to Mrs. Fedizko that her opponent was lying, or I could whisper strategic information in her ear when she was contemplating an answer.

Yes, it was great week. Unfortunately Mrs. Fedizko quit already on Thursday. Apparently the company LearJet had been painted in the wrong shade of pink, her Lamborghini's ashtrays were full and her personal aura reader convinced her that Hades Corp board members had a horrible influence on her chakras.

But I am happy to be back where I belong. And since most of the CEO book budget was already spent, that superb collection is now all for me to enjoy...


Disclaimer: this post and all others are the product of the authors' imagination and any resemblance to real situations is purely bad luck. This article does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my friends, or my alter ego. Brands mentioned are not endorsed by me, but merely tolerated. Don't quote me on that. Don't quote me on anything.

The one where we help to select an application

It is Monday morning, 9.05am in the library and I am doing some ego surfing on the web whilst headbanging to the muzak version of Metalica. Just the perfect way to start the week, were it not for the meeting at 10am.

The powers that be have decided that Hades Corp should form a strategic vision for information management using long term horizon scanning and out of the box scenario thinking. This roughly translates to a frenzy amongst mid-level managers who sees this as an opportunity to get attention from senior management by pretending to have a clue where we should be heading without a lot of real work involved. This as opposed to the general management motto of "we will deal with the issues on a forward going basis". If this were not enough waste of time, they now have asked vendor X to which we sold our soul by standardizing on most of their overpriced, bug-riddled and bloated software to share their views on what Hades Corp should look for in information management.

Well, let me guess... whatever we should look for is exactly what vendor X has on their development schedule. Vendor X has Hades Corp almost completely in their claws, except for the records management and library system. Oh,they tried to sell us on their "solutions". Not that they have anything that even resembles a library system. Or a records management system that I would wish upon my worst enemy. But hey, their sales staff schmoozed the top IT managers, the right gold cuff links where offered and Hollywood award winning Powerpoint presentations did the trick. I had to do a proof of concept with their software and compare it to our current no-so-state-of-the-art-but-working-just-fine-thank-you applications.

So I checked their specifications with our user requirements, which miserably failed. Their products could do the basics but did a lot we don't need.

Management told me that specs aren't always what they seem and users never know what they want, so let's do a pilot to really get a final verdict - vendor X is paying for all the costs. So they flew in their top consultants and their best engineers to pull this off.

So they had a week to create an acceptable pilot setup during the project with competing goals: I wanted to prove my point that we should stick to what we have, vendor X desperately wanted to prove their applications were the best thing since sliced bread.

All week I wore the polo shirt with the logo from our current vendor and I provided the vendor X staff with a copy of the current setup. Of course I made it a bit more challenging by corrupting certain indexing and "forgetting" about certain system passwords. Unfortunately I was in off site meetings every afternoon where my cell phone did not work. But hey, life should not be too easy for the ambitious vendors...

On Friday afternoon they proudly showed their setup to a group of managers. Since our Hades managers have no clue what our library and records management systems do, they were simply amazed by all the shiny buttons, creative use of fonts and stylish logos. They admitted not to have a 100% match with all the user requirements, but management stated that our end users would certainly be willing to give us certain key requirements in exchange for nice shiny buttons and customizable font type (which is of course a very critical feature).

After the presentation, all eyes were on me for the final verdict. Would I give the thumbs up or down?

"Mmmmm... your presentation is.... interesting."

"Thank you, we look forward to working closely with you to set up an extended proof of concept"

"But... there is just one small thing that is very essential and a must have requirement... are your applications compatible with hardware to print punch cards?"

"No, of course not - you must be joking! We noticed you put that in the requirements, but we realized that this is a joke!"

"Well, as you should know - Hades Corporation has a very important government contract with the republic of Elbonia. And as records management experts, you will surely know that Elbonia requires all their business records to be delivered in punch cards.
We must be compliant with these government rules, so I am afraid I cannot vote for your systems."

"But...but..."

"Sorry, I wish I could continue our discussion, but my phone just vibrated and I must leave now to check on our MARC Z39.50 filter".


Disclaimer: this post and all others are the product of the authors' imagination and any resemblance to real situations is purely bad luck. This article does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my friends, or my Mii. Brands mentioned are not endorsed by me, but merely tolerated. Don't quote me on that. Don't quote me on anything.