Obnoxious Librarian from Hades
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The basis of the whole process is getting support from your manager. In my case, I was lucky – but if you can’t get along with your manager, you have no chance of a promotion ever. The rest of the promotion process is “employee driven”, i.e. you have to figure this out on your own with an application designed by a programmer who hates people.
The human resources department for once buried the hatchet with the IT department and invented the SYTYCGAP system (So You Think You Can Get A Promotion). This combines the best of both worlds: the meaningless corporate doublespeak of HR plus the plan, implement and forget mentality of the IT department.
First of all you need to check the competence requirements for your job. Right. The job of librarian was not in the system, as this job was never interesting enough to be formally described. The bad news was that I first had to create the competence requirements myself and then had them mystified by the human resources department. The good news is that I made sure the competence requirements were an exact match of my skills, knowledge and behaviors. When my job competence profile was “improved” by HR, it had 38 different items to fill out.
Secondly the competences consist of skills building blocks and skill building blocks are grouped according to the Hades Corporation Group Leadership Framework. If your head is not spinning by now and you can explain these concepts without laughing, you have passed step 2.
Last, but not least I had to provide evidence of the level of skills the system expected of me. You can’t just claim to have skill level 3b in “enabling an information management architecture”, “successfully embraces different values” or “effectively leverages information assets”.
No, you need someone in the organization to confirm your claim. This weeds out anybody in the organization who does not have friends, as nobody in their right mind would state something for someone else if there isn’t a benefit for them.
Luckily I have lots of friends on the organization and managers who owe me favors. In this case I thought it would be best to get an impressive friend to support my promotion.
Benjamin Chen is Hades Corporation’s Chief Chaos Officer. Nobody really knows what he does all day, but once every year he comes up with an idea or invention that makes the company enormous amounts of money. Besides being a reclusive inventor, he also is a pistol sharpshooter, speaks 14 languages and he plays the piano blindfolded with one hand while simultaneously solving Rubik’s cube with the other hand.
In general he does not attend meetings. When he does, he will be in the back of the room practicing his ninja skills and at the end of the meeting summarize the way forward with a thought provoking haiku like:
Bottom up, top down…
How to define a strategy?
We always debate
Or
A visionary
builds products for the future
but with no market
Benjamin is feared and respected by all, but also a very good friend of the library. He is notorious for never returning books, but is always a very good ally when the future of the library is at stake. So he was more than happy to write the following note:
”The librarian is a pivotal enabler of research and development at Hades Corporation. He is a highly skilled information guru who plays a key role in providing technical and scientific support to staff. He gears the service provided flexibly towards the requirements of the employee needing his service. Last but not least he is an adept and responsive provider of access to the complicated databases in our industry. Given the level of expertise, skill and versatility, I have no hesitation in recommending the librarian for a well deserved and overdue promotion.”
And with that my promotion application form was complete. Of course the HR cycle took various levels of approval, rubber-stamping, authorizing and filing before it was final. But at least now I get pay 2 bucks more per hour! (before taxes).
The one where we negotiate with the vendor
It´s a new year, a new budget to burn, a new batch of new hires to harass and a full year ahead for obnoxiousness.
The end of every year is always a very busy one as all the licenses for the electronic journals, e-books and databases are up for renewal. It´s that time of the year where I have to work out how to match the decreasing budget with the price increase from the publishers. As most publishers are monopolists, it is very hard to negotiate. Every year our procurement department is baffled by dealing with a monopolist - how are they supposed to benchmark prices and play one vendor against the other? Every year I have to convince them that you cannot get e-journals from 20 different sources at competing prices. And no, you cannot get every article or e-book for free via Google.
The worst thing is always the price negotiations with a monopolist. I have always imagined the following discussion at a publisher before them go to meet a librarian for renewal discussions:
Junior sales weasel: "Ok, as you asked me to I have pulled up the file for the customer. What is the new price we will quote them?"
Senior sales weasel: "Easy there, pricing is a very complex art with many variables that come into play. I look at usage, content value, market dynamics, client reputation, the stock market, the shoe size and of course my expected Christmas bonus."
Junior: "Well, how did you then determine the original price when they started with electronic journals and books?"
Senior: "We invent a large number. We see whether we like that number. Then we develop a formula based on historical print holdings, a globalisation fee, a hosting fee, an indexing fee and a one-time set up fee. That formula is precisely the number we want. We then made sure that every price model expect for the all-you-can-eat package is unattractive."
Junior: "How do you make them chose for the all-you-can-eat package if that might not be what they want?"
Senior: "That, my young friend, is a trick of the trade. The library may only look at one small part of the package. Of course that does not create enough revenue to warrant the whopping Christmas bonus I was looking for. So what I do is set up a "free trial" on all our e-journals and e-books. I then send out e-mails to different users at the company telling them about a one month free access to all the content. The word gets around and soon all the users are using a huge amount of content. I tell the librarian that it is a "demand measurement exercise" to "optimize spending versus usage patterns". After a month, all the users are used to having all the content and I suspend the trial. The users start demanding access and I send the librarian a proposal for the all-you-can-eat package which is priced attractively. He finds the budget somehow, signs in blood and makes the users happy. Then after one year we start hiking up the prices based on increased usage - and since the users have grown used to having access, there is no way out."
Junior: "You also told me about a wonderful invention called Dee Ar EM to further annoy the librarian and have more control over the users?"
Senior: "DRM (Digital Rights Management) is a wonderful invention. Every publisher has invented a different version of DRM to restrict usage of downloaded content. We can restrict printing, copying, sharing copies… basically everything people could do with a paper version, we can prevent. Brilliant. And we can interfere with the competition as our DRM plug-in makes the plug-in from the competition crash."
Junior: "I get it. As you also asked me, I have worked with our legal staff to create a new license document. I think you will be pleased with this, as I have increased the amount of legal complex words by 50%, added more hidden clauses, used the tiniest print I could find and in a footnote even make the librarian sign away his soul to us."
Senior: "That's the spirit! So before we go over to the sucker… I mean, customer… let's drop by the car dealer so I can pick out my new car which I will buy from my Christmas bonus."
The one where we provide lessons learned
It is Friday afternoon, just before the long dark tea time of the soul ("The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul is that state which one's soul enters at about 3 o'clock on a Sunda
y afternoon, when one has had all the baths that one can usefully have that day and no matter how long one stares at an article in the paper one will never actually read it, nor use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes" - Douglas Adams). In the background the soundtrack to "American beauty" is playing and I am staring at the wall, trying to come up with input for the latest management idea…
With the financial crisis in full effect, management is looking for cost cutting everywhere. If you were to ask me, if we cut back on management meetings we would save a lot of money. Management meetings usually have a dozen highly paid executives wasting time in a room, coming up with clueless plans. But then, if these highly paid executives were not in meetings, there is nothing really useful they could do instead.
So the latest brilliant idea is to cut back significantly on training and replace it with "a culture of lessons learned":
"Hades Corporation is a knowledge driven organisation. We need to exploit our own knowledge assets further to leverage our investments into intellectual capital. The new lessons learned program is aimed at identifying, sharing and using lessons learned based on our own experiences and insights. This will result in enhanced productivity, efficiency and employee morale - after all, we all have a lesson we can share with the rest!"
Too bad these managers never learn from their own miserable failings in the past. But of course, being a dutiful employee I will contribute to this initiative by teaching lessons:
1. A l-user (library user) calls me to complain that his / her personal storage folder in the document management system is full. I will quickly investigate whether any material in their personal folder has blackmail value for the future and if so, copy that for myself. Following that I will delete all the files in their folder and tell the user I have given them new storage space.
Lesson learned: l-users need to think before asking and phrase questions more precisely. They should ask, "my personal storage area is full, can you give me additional space?”. The best practice answer is "No", by the way.
2. I will use the standard desktop sharing software available on every computer to secretly monitor search behaviour. Normally this software is used only by the helpdesk to solve problems, but I regularly use it to give virtual training. I have found out that via a simple hack I can activate the screen sharing on the user end without the l-user knowing it. This way I can monitor the l-user's search behaviour and give helpful feedback via on screen messages: "NO! That's the WRONG database! Try again", "Why oh why are you searching with just 1 keyword????!" and "Oh come on, don't you know that Google offers only non-validated, low quality information???!"
Lesson learned: think before you do and Big Brother Librarian is watching you.
The one where we leverage the book club
It is Thursday afternoon in the library and I am sipping my green tea while listening to a relaxation cd, specifically designed for librarians: sounds of pages softly being turned, people whispering, books gently being reshelved and librarians shushing people.
This week I learned (again) that even though I have many good ideas to improve how this organisation works, I should not pursue them - or at least have someone else suggest them and then get swamped by the procedures, politics and e-mail cascades.
On Monday I had a great idea to improve the so called off boarding process, which is the haphazard process that should be followed when employees leave the company. Of course Hades Corp has automated that as (and I quote from our intranet): "off boarding is an integral part of the global employee management system, We have automated many of the time-consuming tasks associated with processing employee terminations or separations. Our off boarding is a consistent process and uses artificial intelligence for gathering relevant information, triggering time-critical actions (e.g. conducting exit interviews, notifying payroll systems and benefits partners, etc.) and it reduces the processing costs and compliance risks associated with employment termination."
In reality off boarding is a series of e-mails sent to the manager (who is far too busy and does not care anymore, as employee X is leaving anyway), the human resources focal point (who is offshored to a cost advantageous country, and basically just tries to survive the sheer amount of admin work for the remaining staff) and the employee who is leaving (who considers him- or herself "untouchable"). The result is that after that employee leaves there is a whole range of problems: invoices come in and nobody knows what to do, systems have passwords that nobody knows, the ex-employee is still listed as a contact on the intranet, library books are never returned etc.
So for some strange reason I had the idea that we could improve this by simply connecting different systems to each other to create a checklist of all information related to the employee who is off boarding: a list of books they borrowed, a list of contracts in their name, outstanding invoices etc. That list could then be sent to the manager and the employee, requiring them to tick this off before the employee leave or otherwise both of them have to pay a penalty. I went wrong at the "simply" part. Nothing is simple anymore. We even had a special program here internally to reduce the amount of red tape - the program was called "decomplexify". Simplification was probably a too simple word.
I was surprised to find that there was an actual person I could talk to about my improvement idea, instead of a lengthy form to fill out. Let me recap the conversation I had with the business and solution analyst:
"This is Brandon from the business process improvement team - please tell me about your valuable idea which we will listen to because we care as much as you about making Hades Corp the best it can be"
(I explained my idea to him)
"Ah. Good idea. Yes. Let me just see how we could make this work. Right. First of all, I will label this as a new set of enhancement requirements for the employee management system. I will engage with the architecture and standards team to see how this fits into their landscape model. Then I will have a face to face with the appropriate members of the functional steering committee to make sure your requests are assigned to the appropriate functional portfolio. Once that is done the functional portfolio analyst will analyze, assess, coordinate, prioritize and approve the set of requests. This is of course depending on the impact of your enhancement requests, as we may have to escalate this to the business administrative systems enhancement governance committee. They define the strategic administrative priorities and make appropriate decision as required consistent with their accountability. To ensure proper funding for your enhancement requirements, we will have to liaison with sponsors within the functional administrative units. Are you still with me?"
"Well, Brandon - that sounds like it will take forever, can you tell me how long this will take?"
"Sorry, as a business analyst I cannot answer practical things like deadlines or timeframes, as that is not within my responsibility. But rest assured that I will be generating a lot of forms for you and get you wrapped up in a whirlwind of meetings with IT architects, portfolio managers, steering committee advisors and business analysts to keep you from your normal work."
"Brandon, let's just forget about it, ok?"
"It was nice talking to you and I will send feedback to our management that the employee management system is meeting all requirements, as nobody is suggesting improvements. Have a nice day!"
Luckily there is as always the official way of doing things, and the way to get things done. In this case, I just happen to run the local book club… and several wives of senior managers are members. Yesterday evening we had our monthly book club session, and before we started to discuss "The time traveller's wife" we talked about what was bothering us. The nice ladies in my club were concerned about my fruitless efforts to improve the work culture at Hades Corporation. We talked about how their husbands were more concerned by their targets and bonuses, instead of helping their employees. And book club members help each other out… so this morning I received a personal phone call from the senior vice president of global IT, aski
ng me to meet with him later today to discuss my highly interesting improvement idea. When I thanked him, I could swear I hear him mumble "yeah, I just want my wife to stop nagging me about this… ".
The one where we survive the support staff managers meeting
It is Monday afternoon and I am having a small celebration in the library, as the blog has reached the 400 subscriber mark and I have survived the monthly support staff managers meeting.
The monthly support staff managers meeting is by far the most soul crushing meeting I have ever encountered. However, I have to attend as otherwise library hostile decisions will get taken by the others. One time I was ill and that day the rest decided to switch paperclip suppliers without consulting me, especially because the library has very specific paperclip requirements to clip circulation slips to magazines. Rest assured I took my revenge by later on ripping out selected pages of their desk copies of the dictionary.
The other attendees are from other support departments: IT support, accounting, human resources, office maangement and internal communications. Like the library, all these departments are pretty much seen as second rate by management and the employees. Support departments don't get invited to attend strategic meetings or future roadmap workshops. That leaves the support staff managers meeting for us as the main opportunity to execute our office politics and power play.
The meeting itself has no real agenda, as everyone keeps bringing up his or her own personal issues during the meeting. This prevents the others from being able to prepare for issues like the theme for the annual office Christmas party, the office supply policy or the mandatory font type for the intranet. The person bringing up the issue has the element of surprise and can try to lobby with his or her potential allies before the meeting.