Do Collaboration Tools need Librarians?
Michael J. Fuhrman
At a recent Pacfic IT Pros meeting at Microsoft, I listened to a presentation about Collaboration Tools. The speaker discussed several major benefits of collaboration tools and why businesses are starting to move towards them. My understanding of what was discussed is, little bits of information are being lost in the constant flow of information .. whether it be by email or by Facebook timeline posts.
The problem with that businesses are trying to solve are the workflow issues from the beginning of a customer’s problem to the solution. This may be a customer’s order, or a request for support on a product, or a billing issue. The range of issues and how they are handled vary with each customer and problem. However, there are some patterns that could be identified.
- More than one person is involved in solving or resolving the customer’s issue.
- These people need to discuss the customer’s issue in order to resolve it.
- The conversations can happen anywhere and at any time.
- Each customer request needs to enter into a system in order to be tracked, traced, monitored, and aggregated.
- Most processes are initially captured as Todo’s, Calendar Appointments, Meeting Notes, Text Messages, Telephone Calls, Follow up Emails, Online / Offline Discussions, Document Comments.
- Information about past issues needs to be captured, cataloged, indexed, organized, stored, retrieved, discriminated, and purged. (Librarianship)
- These Processes (referring to previous line item) need to become ISO Processes
- These ISO Processes need to have Gant Charts and WorkFlow diagrams attached to them.
- These ISO Processes need to be automated to take the full effect of both Collaboration and Automation.
- Metrics are needed to insure that customer issues are being taken care of in a timely fashion.
- Six Sigma is needed to review various ISO processes to determine the best method in resolving the general set of customer issues.
The problem with most of the tools out there, is that they don’t address all of these factors.
The biggest problem is that there are no tools for Librarians, thus when an employee leaves, their information becomes lost in the bulk of email threads, notes, or other conversation mediums that were used. This may be due to the lack of understand in how libraries work, and how to apply those methodologies to information gathering, cataloging and storage for later retrieval.
The question I’m going to ask various librarians is what they would need in order aggregate this information. In the basic scenario, a librarian would be asked to consolidate and generate a report that summarizes some business process or generate a policy on how a business process should be shaped.
When I asked the presenter this question, they suggested finding a champion. I think this should be a real position, not held by Watson, but by a real person who digs through the diverse sets of information like an interactive SQL engine and builds an answer to the questions, not only with internal information but also external information sources.