Category: Professional Development

Value of support services

My thoughts have continued to develop, since a previous post’s conclusion, around the topics of workplace change and the influence on organizational design.  My latest thought is – perhaps we all need to take some responsibility for organizational design?  Every day, by interacting with someone in a work capacity or a colleague in a social environment, you are influencing the culture.  In your own big/small way you are influencing ‘how things are done round here’.

This came to mind again after attending a recent ‘Demonstrating your Value’ presentation, organized by CILIP’s Commercial, Legal and Scientific Information Group (CLSIG).  When I was in the session I know I was nodding along thinking ‘yes, very sensible’.  However, on reflection after the tube/bus ride home I thought again.  The feeling that overwhelmed me was how submissive the whole event felt.  Let me explain, firstly, by looking at some highlight notes from the presentation itself…

  • value = greater value add than your cost (depends on culture of organization and the credibility of your service)
  • credibility = utility (fit for purpose) / warranty / meets expectations
  • can influence credibility needs of organization
  • use user audits, ask people in detail what they need and how you are achieving it – ask ‘what else should I do?’
  • align headcount to roles, focus on wider value rather than niches
  • build story around budget, accurate numbers not enough
  • promote your value in language akin to firm’s advertising
  • learn from other support departments, scope for shared metrics, etc.
  • actively fill roles where the firm has previously used external consultants.

What came from my pork pie-fueled (appropriate for the venue) reflection/insight was that this all suggests support services are answerable to their masters and not enough influencers upon them.  This is of course understandable, as one presenter pointed out there are actually very few UK professionals left in areas such as legal research due to outsourcing, off-shoring, etc. but surely this is part of the problem.  I do not want to add to the stereotype of the ‘mousey librarian’, indeed most support staff leaders I have met over the years (including in library and information services) have tended to be outspoken.  Therefore, is there a better way to measure value?  User audits may identify what a business wants from its support services but not necessarily give the services scope for shifting expectations, as the support professionals pick up and develop ideas for the future of work.  Perhaps the below (aiming to be applicable to any support service):

  • A culture change survey: “In the last year my opinion of the x service has improved” (score out of 10, + to -).
  • An awareness survey: “Name of team member/service/offering” (worked with/used through to unaware).
  • An influence survey: “I have learned something from team member/service/offering this year” (agree through to disagree).

By all means, measure your service in financial terms but let’s not forget that every business is only as strong as its people and people need to influence the organization toward somewhere they would like to work.  That will change over time and simply working toward existing cultures won’t help move you forward.

What kind of organization do you want to work in?

‘Social enterprise’, ‘networked enterprise’, ‘learning culture’ and many more related buzzwords are flying around at the time being and influencing the professional literature and conferences.  What perhaps makes these themes different, to their predecessors, is that it is clear they cut across traditional disciplines as, arguably, the first big shift of power away from IT departments since their creation.

Tools such as ThisWorkedWell offer, on the face of it, walled garden knowledge capture and dissemination.  For many organizations this would have been the responsibility of knowledge/information departments in the past.  However, such new tools recognize the value in collaboration for learning and efficiency, thus rethinking workplace learning and communications.

The mobile, BYOD, nature of many of these tools arguably democratize the workforce, albeit with the need for some staff to “let go of control“.  A point in that “let go of control” article, about Google’s environment, is that transparency is key.

Ultimately the questions over all of these related areas, for me, come back to “what kind of organization do I want to work in?” My answer would have to include characteristics such as the organization:

  • being transparent,
  • recognizes learning happens all the time,
  • encourages and supports value from people reflecting upon, and sharing, their work with others,
  • having efficient and effective communication platforms (as advocated on this ‘engaged worker’ infographic),
  • make use of my data as appropriate (for example, could you expose my twitter data – as in Gwittr profile below – to my colleagues to show my areas of interest?),
  • recognizes the value in play (such as the social areas in Google offices) and skills from activities such as playing video games.

What I am really talking about here is knowledge work and I have to agree with much from Jarche.com.  This of course relates to corporate culture and much more, again cutting across traditional theoretical disciplines.  An interesting time, especially for organisational design professionals.

Gwittr stats on use of Twitter up to May 2014
Gwittr data in May 2014

What to call teachers and learning events?

Various things of late have got me thinking again about the nature of learning and the value of different terminology to guide behavior.  Some quick notes, for my reference, below.

This address by Bill Clinton highlights some useful examples of education schemes from around the globe, with the focus being on the impact of education upon poverty and opportunity.  A key thread in his argument is the need for young people to be exposed to at least one ‘great teacher’.  This grates slightly due to my dislike of the idea of ‘teaching’ in a connected environment where there are many kinds of learning event.  Does the facilitator’s title have to be driven by the nature of the learning event and, as such, ‘teacher’ may be perfectly valid in a remote African classroom?

Thinking back to the variety of event types that now exist, as discussed on a previous blog, we are seeing more and more formats emerge, often based around what a specific tool (such as Google Hangouts) can do.  One term I did not list was ‘Festival’ but the once-upon-a-time JISC Conference (which I attended a number of times) is now the JISC Digital Festival (although they do host an online conference too).  How can we best leverage subtle changes such as naming conventions, room design, catering, etc. to engage attendees of all types to develop a better formal/informal learning experience?  Can we best label ‘delegates’ and ‘teachers’ to maintain a sense of respect (where needed) but also shift the responsibility for (all) learning toward the learner and their network?  I personally do not think we should see this is as age related where we expect the young to respect their ‘teachers’ but the name for the role being less important in other age groups.

In the above I am seeing conferences and other events as learning opportunities, perhaps one trick is to have conference delegates agree to certain expectations in the same way you may have a student, in a formal education environment, sign up to a ‘charter’ or other form of learning contract?

Overall, I would like to see different names for facilitators of learning based on the nature of the event, this would help people be clear on the expectations.  For example, a webinar presenter is one thing whereas a classroom facilitator does something very different.

Can there be ‘original thought’ in the era of the knowledge-age organization?

I think I have only ever applied for one temporary ‘professional’ role.  My logic normally is that with constraints such as a mortgage I would not want to risk a period of unemployment.  However, in the case of this particular role it sounded fantastic so I thought I would apply.  I was pleasantly surprised when I was offered an interview even though I did not have one of the key ‘essential’ criteria of the person specification.  When interview day came I, for some reason, developed horrendous hiccups and generally did not do very well.

Anyway, one particularly awkward point was where I started describing past achievements and relating them to some of the prevalent best-practice theory in the discipline (eLearning).  Now I think I might have come across as suggesting that I (or rather my employer of the time and team) were ahead of the game.  At one point, I think, I even suggested it being a little ‘chicken and egg’ in that practice and theory become so intertwined that it becomes difficult to remember what came first – theory, you implementing an idea, recognized best practice, etc.  At best I think I suggested I was an original thinker and innovator, but without really backing it up as a reflective practitioner perhaps should be able to, at worst I appeared egomaniac-ish saying “I was first” to do various things.

Whilst I did not deal with it very well on that interview day, I would have now suggested that 100% ‘original thinking’ is incredibly difficult in our networked world.  In other words, we are products of our environments and if one has a particularly active personal learning ecosystem the ‘original’ source of an idea is difficult to track.  The challenge then should be to ensure you ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ rather than reinventing the wheel.  Whilst the Internet has accelerated growth and sharing of ideas contributing to a world that is rapidly changing [I wouldn’t agree with all of this video but it is at least useful for seeing the prevailing mood] it also means that you can quickly appear out-of-date or just rehashing the work of others.  This has been particularly highlighted in the last week or so…

  • This article on big data in Higher Education, for example, makes a number of valid points but few are original.  Where it mentions work being done to track student achievement by their library use, many in HE will be already familiar with examples of such work.  Indeed some institutions already track devices (certainly of guests) to their networks and LMS/VLE data (should) has been used in ways such as those mentioned in the article.  Perhaps the issue the author really alludes to is the potential value in linking data and (I would argue) warehousing data from multiple institutions to see bigger trends.  Indeed this cross-pollination would help improve the data usage, for organisational effectiveness purposes, mentioned in the article.
  • In the L&D space, this week I watched the recording of a recent LSG webinar from Jane Hart.  Now I have followed Jane online for years which makes it tricky to pick out how much she is confirming my hunches/way of doing things as opposed to leading my thinking with original ideas but this recording really hit home.  Whilst I agree that it is fair to say ‘lets not kid ourselves, people are not going to adopt all of this’ (a point approximately made in the presentation) I have to feel that in an office/knowledge/people based business there has to be much smarter coming together of learning, sharing, collaboration, knowledge/information/resource management, etc. in the kind of ways Jane mentions.  I tweeted at an event earlier in the year that Salesforce-centric employees seemed to always be the example given of where some of this works, but surely there are leaders out there who are implementing appropriate organisational development(s)?

I would argue that joined up systems and data are one thing but, realistically, you need an enterprise where learning is fully embedded culturally.  Here is where education organizations have an advantage as learning is their mission but they should also be able to use the LMS/VLE as their organizational platform, alas I would imagine too many break that shared social hub by using separate Intranets, etc.  Yes there remain specialist functions, that need certain software (arguably a Library Management System would be an example), but for being an employee of a collaborative organization that shares, reflects, learns and adapts as one I really do feel we need to move from breaking things into silos of learning, knowledge, resource, etc. management.

Perhaps it is my own environment and ‘professional genetics’ of training and beliefs that sends me down the above road but surely the above should be the case and I am not diving into ‘original thinking’.  However, when you see so many project management, L&D, learning technology and other advertised posts which are clearly based around old models it does make me wonder.