Strategic Information Resources: A New Organization Copyright CAUSE 1994. This paper was presented at the 1994 CAUSE Annual Conference held in Orlando, FL, November 29- December 2, and is part of the conference proceedings published by CAUSE. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, that the CAUSE copyright notice and the title and authors of the publication and its date appear, and that notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To copy or disseminate otherwise, or to republish in any form, requires written permission from CAUSE. For further information: CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301; 303-449-4430; e-mail info@cause.colorado.edu STRATEGIC INFORMATION RESOURCES: A NEW ORGANIZATION Dennis Aebersold Vice President for Strategic Information Resources Gordon A. Haaland President ABSTRACT The President and Provost of Gettysburg College decided at the end of 1993 that, given the importance of technology in the strategic plan for Gettysburg, they would make the bold move of merging the Computing Services Department and the Library into a single division called Strategic Information Resources. The new division was to report to a newly created Vice President position, which would in turn report to both the President and Provost and serve on the President's Council. This paper describes the steps to date of the process which was used to effect the merger. I. Why Merge? In response to what we see as the way of the future, Gettysburg College has been and will be devoting significant resources to information technology as it is known in such functional areas as the Library, Computer Services Telecommunications, Management Information Systems, and the Print Shop. These are all areas responsible for helping members of the college community gain access to, store, retrieve, and analyze information. A liberal arts curriculum has proven remarkably effective in helping students master new technologies and synthesize new material. Gettysburg College intends to continue to develop strategies to promote the use of advanced information technologies in the College's instructional programs. We have already built an enviable computer network, an achievement recognized by CAUSE in 1993 when we received honorable mention for the CAUSE networking award. It is increasingly clear, however, that the information network is just a prelude to the larger information world. The increasing availability of information in electronic form and the ability to analyze that information on the computer will dramatically change the way we teach and learn. By the twenty-first century electronic information technology will have transformed the workplace, nationally and internationally. If we are to meet these transformations and provide our clientele with superior service we knew that our information structures have to change. Our instrument of change is the integration of the Library and Computing Services into a single Division: Strategic Information Resources. This Division has been placed under the direction of Dennis Aebersold, Vice President for Strategic Information Resources and formerly Associate Provost for Computing and the Sciences. Our approach is intended to provide students and faculty members with the best possible support as they work in an environment shaped by the "information revolution" that is already upon us. This step is one that we believe all institutions of higher education must take eventually. We expect that the timing of this move will contribute to our competitive advantage as an institution in a crowded educational marketplace. Predictions are risky, but it is already plain that, rather than waiting months for the latest research to appear in printed form, scholars will have electronic access to (research) as soon as it has passed the test of peer review. The printed materials to which that research refers will also increasingly be available over the network in electronic form. Large collections of primary texts are already available electronically or will shortly become so. Standard reference materials can already be purchased on CD- ROM and accessed from an appropriately-equipped desktop computer. Sound, images, and other non-print media can also be transmitted electronically. Only to gain access to rare books and manuscript materials will one be compelled to visit a traditional library, and even some of these materials will be available in digital form, just as they are now available on microfilm. II. Aligning Strategies The merger of library with computing services falls in line with the strategic goals of the College. Recognizing that technology will continue to play a major role in education at all levels, with special implications for the way teaching and learning happen at the college level, Gettysburg has set as primary goals 1) to develop the best possible computer-based information resources and programs; 2) to promote exploration of the curriculum and co-curriculum using technology and 3) to provide appropriate access to these resources. As we looked at the service demands of our community, the rapid pace of change of technology, and the direction we wanted to take, we realized that the existing administrative structure did not suit or support our vision of the future. In the interest of dramatically improving operations in the new division Gettysburg embarked on a 6 month program intended to enable us to define the strategic direction the new division should take and to articulate the changes to process, organization, people and technology required to make our vision a reality. Our vision is, simply, to create one information service organization on campus. Before, the Library and Computing Services were competing as providers, creating redundancies in information provision, some overlap of skill sets, and constant battles between old and new ways of operating. Among the benefits of a combined organization are the elimination of unhealthy competition between departments, the effective utilization of complementary skill sets, and the ability to build a more flexible and responsive organization. While we are still in the project planning phase, we do, realistically, anticipate certain results. First, we believe this is the way of the future and that our efforts will situate the College in good competitive position in the future. Second, we are being very careful to align the strategies for Information Technology and the new Division with the strategies of the College. Third, we will make more resources available to faculty and students and eliminate inefficiencies in operations. III. The 'How' of Change With the help of the Business Process Renewal (BPR) evaluations we will eliminate redundancies in the things we provide. We plan to decrease cycle time, or the time it takes to do such things as acquire a new book, catalog it, or install a computer. Through increased efficiencies we will lower costs, improve competitiveness and hopefully delight our customers. The merger was announced in January 1994; in February 1994 the Vice President moved his office to the Library to get a better understanding of the culture, to get to know the Library staff, and to signal the start of the merger process. Merging the two divisions has clear advantages from an operations standpoint but it has brought on other expected issues on the human resource side that are not easy to work out on paper. Differences in job expectations, for example, work habits, and the cultural environments in computing services and the library polarized the two groups initially. The announcement of the merger had left the librarians and the hourly employees in the library feeling very uncertain about coming events. There was no open hostility but there was considerable distrust and some feeling that the administration had not approved of employee performance and was sending in troops to whip them into new shape. To clarify what the issues were, we conducted a cultural assessment survey of both staffs, which produced surprisingly positive results. The study showed the two departments to be 180 degrees apart on questions like "do you exist in a 'Reactive...Proactive' organization?"; "Open to Change...Resistant to Change? "; "flexible work environment... strict work environment"? When the two groups were asked where they would like to be in the future, the alignment of the cultures was almost perfect. It was at this point that we knew that a true merger of the two organizations into one division would be possible. We began the merger process in June, 1994. We demanded radical change in both organizations. We were looking for flexibility that did not exist in the library, and we had to increase the speed of service and the quality of service in the computing area. We intended to cut costs but we did not start with a mandate to cut employees. Our methodology for change was Business Process Re- engineering which we chose to call "renewal". Michael Hammer defines BPR to be "The fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business process to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service and speed."[1] Thomas Davenport defines re-engineering as process innovation. He states "Process innovation initiatives start with a relatively clean slate, rather than from the existing process. The fundamental business objectives for the process may be predetermined, but the means of accomplishing them is not. Designers of the new process must ask themselves, "Regardless of how we have accomplished this objective in the past, what is the best possible way to do it now?"[2] Our approach did not start with process but rather with strategy. We felt it important to build a foundation for the new organization where employees had a deeper understanding as to what we were trying to create and that was tied to a mission, with strategic and tactical goals. We also felt it of paramount importance to have a measurement architecture in place that would allow us to know how well we were achieving our goals. Our approach was top down (work through a core team) based on strategy and considered in parallel, people, organization, technology and process, which we believe to be all parts of a single whole. We developed a three-phase plan that started with initiation and moved through direction setting to innovation. IV. Time Lines and Expectations The BPR project was designed to span five months starting in April of 1994. We actually started in June and will be finished just before Thanksgiving. Upon commencement of the project a core and extended team was set up to undertake the creation of project deliverables and manage project communication and process. The core team was comprised of three staff members plus the Vice President who shared in the input, analysis and interpretation of business process renewal (BPR) phases. Communication with the rest of the division was established from the beginning as a critical aspect of the project. We established concentric circles of communication, with the core team at the center, an extended team comprised of eight staff in the next ring, and the rest of the division staff at the periphery. The extended team's job was to update and solicit input from the division staff and interpret the work of the core team. Each extended team member conducted small group meetings with a prescribed group--and each group contained members from the library and computing services staff. At the height of discussions over the summer, the core and extended teams met weekly, and small groups met every other week. The core and extended teams developed mission and values statements at the start of the project which were then presented to the entire division for discussion. The final revised statements served as the foundation of change and imparted to staff a sense of the culture and climate of the future organization. Mission Statement: The information resources division develops and provides information services and resources needed for the learning environment at Gettysburg College. Values Statement: The division fosters an atmosphere of open inquiry and continuous education for all staff. This demands a highly qualified, flexible and team-oriented IR staff committed to excellence and the values of the educational experience. Following completion of these, lengthy discussions about what the new organization would actually do and what improvements we wanted to make on current service led us to distill three major goals for the organization. The goals simply state what we want to do and how we want to do it. Goals: 1. Provide Information 2. Enable Organizational Success 3. Maintain a top-quality organization, consistent with customer needs Goal setting based on our vision of an innovative, wall- less, fast-service organization brought us to the next phase of innovation: activity modeling. An activity model will represent at a high-level all of the activities necessary within the scope of the project and provides the opportunity to eliminate cumbersome, redundant, and other non-value adding activities from the future organizational design. Cataloguing a book, for example, or installing a computer are both means of providing access to information. Once these types of connections were made, all activities could be defined at higher levels and then related to the goals. If an activity did not fit, it brought into question its usefulness as well as called attention to the comprehensiveness of our goals. The cross-checking exercise helped us ask questions like: is it the role of the division to do X? What value does activity X have to the organization? Do we still want to do this? Some 45 activities comprehensively described the organization and all its functions, from personnel management to equipment maintenance and information resource expansion. In order to plan for the future, the core team's charge was to identify the key cycles of tomorrow's organization: this would provide the structure for organizing the future division. What constitutes a cycle? An event that triggers a chain of activities--such as a request for a book. Mapping out cycles brings into focus business processes and provides some of the real substance of organizational change. As we discussed a book request, for example, we moved through acquisitions, cataloging and circulation and revealed a larger picture. These access tools were essentially delivery systems. The goals to provide information and maintain a top-quality organization made us question whether or not we wanted to deliver this information in this way, and how quickly we wanted to deliver to best benefit the learning environment. The question brings into play the role of people and technology in the process of delivering information, and how they would relate in the new organization--people, organization, technology, process-- bringing us back to the pyramid. In almost all cases, the successful completion of a strategic cycle will result in value added to one of the stakeholders--faculty, students, administrative staff--of the College. The cycle model is evaluated in terms of time and/or value added that it provides to the organization. Organizational structure begins to emerge from the cycle and activity models, after they are grounded in internal cultural criteria, such as create an atmosphere of open communication and promote a learning organization that encourages self-development. From the cycle model, logical units of work and organizing criteria form the basis for preparing organizational structures. In order to allocate resources into the structure, activities need to be defined in terms of the knowledge, skills, abilities and personal characteristics (KSAPs) of the people who will be performing them. Process, not task, becomes the focus. While this sounds eminently logical, it is not trivial. In our case, we spent a session with the entire staff matching 'KSAPs' to activities. Not surprisingly, many people had a hard time conceptualizing job functions not described as specific tasks, such as "cataloging serials", but rather as activities, such as "select acquisition". Nevertheless, KSAPs provides the basis for placement of staff in a new organization. What are some of the personnel problems that arise in such a process? Most are predictable. "Where does my old job fit in the new organization?" produces one form of anxiety. Another form corresponds to identity. People still identify themselves as library and computer services staff and take an 'us versus them' attitude toward their new colleagues. Fear of change sparks rumor about which heads will role and what jobs will be eliminated. Everyone knows that anything and everything is open for restructuring and this fuels resistance to change. Communication helps to dispel most of these problems, but it is also clear that not everyone will be happy with new arrangements and we expect to see some fall-out. V. Transition and Change management Change is managed by the adjustment of resources-- people, organization, technology, process--around a strategy. Not only do we need to create a new organizational structure, but we need a transitional structure because not all change can happen at once. We plan to integrate 3 BPR teams in the next months, and another three by the second quarter of 1995. The first teams to be formed are Planning, Response and Training. The next three will be New Initiatives, Operations and Selections. The teams will receive extensive training on team work and self management. The organization will have no bosses; the transition team will help coach the other teams through difficult new procedures like evaluation and rewards. We believe we will begin to reap benefits but June 1995 and we hope to be operating comfortably and efficiently by Jan. 1996. ENDNOTES******************************** 1. Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation (Harper Business,1993) p.32. 2. Thomas H. Davenport, Process Innovation, (Harvard Business School Press, 1993) p.11.