Corporate Score

Marrying two expert tools will help you sustain your corporate library

By James M. Matarazzo & Toby Pearlstein -- Library Journal, 2/1/2007

The library manager of a large insurance company rearranges the library's print collection to resemble a large bookstore, set up mostly by subject with excellent signs above each section. In consultation with her corporate supervisor, she purposefully makes the library's onsite services 95 percent self-help. Now she focuses her team on the main goal: supporting the sales team in its efforts to sell insurance. In positioning the library to strengthen the firm's most important activity, the library manager reasons that if the company is successful and the library can point to its contributions to that success, it will be successful, too.

A large professional services firm reshapes its organizational structure around industry-specific goals in order to remain competitive. The manager of the firm's research service knows it must adapt also or become marginalized. He assigns industry-specific researchers to provide more contextual products to the firm's teams. By demonstrating that the researchers are aware of the firm's strategies, and by aligning their services to these changes, the library becomes a full partner in supporting the organization's new reality.

These two scenarios demonstrate a transition of library services from an older, warehouse model to one focusing on client-centered uses. Corporate librarians hold the key to determining new ways to work within their environments. They must drive the process to change the view of the company library as a liability—as overhead, as a cost center, as part of the problem—to the library as a solution center, a necessary investment.

For the sixth consecutive year, we hear that corporate libraries are losing both space and staff, closed by management who believe that any needed information is freely available on the web. While no official tally is kept, the magnitude of the problem can be estimated by reviewing SLA membership data and our own experience. We calculate a more than 20 percent decline in SLA membership since 1997 (a figure SLA confirms), roughly when the Internet began having an impact on the lives of librarians and information science professionals and their clients. Even if only half the special librarians in the United States and Canada belong to SLA, and even if this represents only a portion of closures, reductions, or voluntary and involuntary early retirements, it is clear that to help themselves, company librarians must find a new path to success.

Strategic thinking is key

With this in mind, we suggest two tactics to achieving full alignment with your parent organization. First, become a thought leader. Second, measure your contribution in language your boss understands. While this has been said before, it is crucial to use professional tools paired with management tools to prepare yourself, your team, and your library for success. These are, respectively, the SLA Competencies for Informational Professionals and the Balanced Scorecard construct, introduced by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton in 1992 and continuously expanded into its current version (Alignment: Using the Balanced Scorecard To Create Corporate Synergies, Harvard Business Sch., 2006). These aids help connect the competencies to your strategy and create a “balance” between operational and financial measures so you can showcase your library's contributions (see illustration).

In its Competencies for Informational Professionals, most recently revised in 2003, SLA's focus is necessarily on core skills and services relevant to the parent organization. The whole process of ensuring both personal and professional competencies can help define the value of the librarian and library services to the business. Value becomes somewhat easier to demonstrate because the library's benefits are designed and implemented to enhance larger corporate objectives.

While SLA's competencies can help a library manager manage “down,” so to speak, the balanced scorecard is a tool for managing “up.” It can bridge the library-oriented/phrased competencies that you and your team will have no trouble understanding and the business-centric assessment of the value of the library to your organization. The scorecard helps translate your strategy into measurable objectives and concrete actions.

If you already capture metrics about your offerings (reference requests, hits and click-throughs on your library's web site, user stats on online products), you are ahead of the game. If you don't, the scorecard can be a good guide for thinking about what your organization will find important to track. It enables you to set goals and measures for both the financial and operational side of your services and can be an indicator of what really matters and consequently how to focus your discussions with decision-makers. When the boss asks you to explain why it's important to invest in realizing the competencies, the balanced scorecard can be your Rosetta Stone (or BabelFish if you prefer).

Become a thought leader

In order to implement the balanced scorecard and competencies fully, you'll need a plan for becoming a thought leader. We've developed five critical points:

1. Understand your customers You and your team must understand what the organization does. Find out what your customers do in their daily work and where gaps exist. Focus groups, individual interviews, or surveys will help you learn what information and services are necessary for your customers to succeed.
2. Know how management defines success Show senior management how your services can contribute to their success. Start by answering these critical questions: What are the higher goals your company seeks to achieve? Which units are key to achieving these goals and what information services will enhance their productivity? Align your strategy with those goals.
3. Refine the services offered Most company librarians provide services to anyone at the firm. It is a mistake to offer a little help to hundreds of employees in scores of departments. This only dilutes your support, and when cuts must be made, no one will stand up for the library because no one receives substantive assistance. Instead, prioritize your target audiences and create champions—thinking first of those on whom the success of the firm depends.
4. Be client-centered Get inside the key units of the firm. The more time you spend “connected” to those you bolster (whether virtually or physically), the sooner you will be seen as a valued member of the team and your contribution to the team's success acknowledged.
5. Provide leadership The “library as place” in today's business environment must give way to the “library as provider of services” that permeates the organization and is integrated, as much as is practical, into its daily workflow. It is the manager's role to be a well-informed information professional who thinks strategically and is able to recognize and create opportunities to make an impact on the organization's business goals.

While there is no magic bullet to guarantee success (sometimes even the most cogent argument will not influence corporate decision-makers to see beyond short-term solutions), the general direction is clear: the greatest chance of success will come from affiliating the library with the unique goals of its parent organization and the needs of the people working to hit those targets. This goes beyond parroting a mission statement or tweaking position names and titles; it demands practitioners who are strategic thinkers. Librarians must become the catalysts for increasing the productivity and effectiveness of their customers, whether they be bench scientists or management consultants.

Stabilizing our future

Views vary widely about the causes of downsizing and closures of corporate libraries. Corporate libraries and librarians have been affected even in environments where a strong library foundation has been traditional. But as traditional library services are vanishing, so are its traditional practitioners.

What should alarm us is that more companies don't recognize the utility of their library during times of downturn. Rather, the library is often seen as a handicap. Whether as a result of consolidation, outsourcing, offshoring, or just plain naïveté about the web's capabilities, there is no question that the closure of many corporate libraries and attendant job losses are having an effect on corporate librarians. Minds won't be changed without us. It's our job to show the companies we work for why our services are essential.