Charleston conference 2011 business cases for new service development in research libraries
1. Business Cases for New Service
Development in Research Libraries
A Report to the Charleston Conference
2. Responsibility and Credits
Ted Fons, OCLC
Mike Furlough, Penn State University
Carol Hunter, University of North Carolina
Elizabeth Kirk, Dartmouth College
Judy Luther, Informed Strategies
Michele Reid, North Dakota State University
CLIR/DLF sponsors this work
MediaCommons will host results of our work
Beverly Lynch, Director, Senior Fellows Program,
UCLA introduced us
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4. Our goal is to provide the Library/Higher Education
community with processes, tools, best practices, and
examples to enable successful planning for library
services to support new scholarly communications
practices.
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5. Transformation: Drivers
Consumer technology and user expectations
The marketplace for academic publishing
The open access/copyleft movement
The emergence of digital scholarship in humanities &
social sciences
The emergence of computationally-driven data-
intensive science
Mass digitization
…
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7. If you can’t persuade me that the work you’re doing is going to make us more famous, we’re
not going to be interested in investing in you…. Is that wise and profound and good? No. It’s
stupid. But that’s the way it is….
--John V. Lombardi, President of Louisiana State University at the October 2011 ARL
Meeting.
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9. Recommendations for Success
We need a toolkit for making informed decisions
about creating new services
Diagnose organizational and institutional readiness
Develop a business case
“A culture of discipline is not a principle of business;
it is a principle of greatness.” (Jim Collins on non-
profits)
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10. Organizational readiness
In your DNA, or a radical shift?
Are the climate and capacity ready for very different
kinds of services?
Four steps:
Understand if you are mission-ready
Know your risk tolerance
Determine outcomes that promote impact and
sustainability
Make sure that you can put resources in the right places
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11. Mission and risk
Do proposed new services “fit”?
Create a balance between allowing change and
maintaining identity
Are the library and the institution comfortable with
new service development?
Is risk-taking rewarded or is maintaining the status
quo essential?
Is there an understanding of the importance of
revenue and a willingness to keep services
financially feasible?
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12. Outcomes and resource allocation
Social enterprises balance social and economic
values
Outcomes must promote high mission impact and
high viability
Is the moment right?
Environmental scan: are all of the essential pieces in
place?
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13. Developing a business case
What happens if… ?
Multiple steps
Create a basic outcome statement
Identify options and analyze them
Pinpoint and test
Write your implementation plan
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14. Outcomes and options
Define what a service will accomplish
Tie desired outcomes to library and institutional
strategic goals
Brainstorm every possible option for action, then
narrow the list
Gather data and analyze the options
Benefits, viability, costs,
Business model – scalable
Timeframes
Talk to key stakeholders early and often (marketing)
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15. Pinpoint, test, implement
Find the sweet spot
Identify and plan for risk
Be realistic: avoid best-case scenarios
Rewrite the outcome
Write an implementation plan
Action items and timelines
Value proposition and marketing
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16. Further considerations: Test. Build. Assess.
Rebuild.
To pilot or not to pilot?
Project management skills required
Creativity and freedom to fail
Execution and assessment
And more assessment
The cycle of change and assessment
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17. Go/No
Go
3. Launch
Decision
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2.2 Pilot
4. Periodic
2.1 Business Reassessmen
Case t
Development
Go/No Decision
Go 3
Decision
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5.1 Service 5.2
1. Modification Exit
Organizational
Assessment
Time
Business Planning
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19. Why Case Studies
Explore planning processes employed by libraries
"on the ground"
Can we identify best practices?
Refine and extend initial work
Publish examples from practitioners to provide
models
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20. Recruiting 6 Participants
The commitment:
Initial questionnaire on baseline data
1.5 day on-site interviews about planning & managing the
services
Follow ups & write ups
http://is.gd/casestudies
Respond by November 15
This is NOT A CONSULTING SERVICE
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21. Timeline
By end of 2011:
Publish initial report via Media Commons
Identify pool of case study sites
First half of 2012:
Conduct case study research
September 2012:
Publish final results
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22. Questions
Email address of today’s speakers
Carol Hunter: cfhunter@email.unc.edu
Judy Luther: judy.luther@informedstrategies.com
Suggest a case study subject
http://is.gd/casestudies
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Notes de l'éditeur
NO TITLE FOR THIS SLIDE Over the past two decades we've seen a "transformation" in our thinking about the Library's role in higher education and in the life cycle of research. No longer sitting at the end point of creation, we see ourselves now in the middle and at the start of the process.Libraries have responded creatively with hihgly innovative programs and services. We have had to re-invent ourselves and we are continuing to do so. One reason we have undertaken this study is to ensure that these programs have value, and that our re-inventions are recognized as valuable and useful by our colleagues on campus. THIS IS NOT a study of the costs, short-term or long-term, of starting up or sustaining these programs. We know how little we all know about this topic, and how much we need good data. What we are trying to do is to help navigate the inherent uncertainty in the process of developing these services and manage the risk for the best results.
These are often-cited drivers for thesetranformations.
The marks and logos on the screen here represent just SOME of the ways we have responded to those in Libraries and Higher Ed. They are better known because they have been successful in various ways. And they have inspired a host of us to adopt their tools o methods to provide similar services on our campuses.Institutional repositories Digital scholarship support services Library or campus-based publishing servicesExploration of e-research support & data-curation servicesInitiation of large-scale & multi-institutional collaborations to preserve digital data & establish shared print repositories. There are many others, including re-thinking the definitions of “library collections” as well as the nature and purpose of library spaces.All of these responses have taken place against the backdrop of a soaring economic market that then tanked spectacularly.
Perhaps the Broader Context for our work is most starkly embodied by this quote from John Lombardi....one that he may have tossed off for laughs but which rings uncomfortably true. Our community has put renewed emphasis on assessment and on demonstrating our value to the University. (ACRL REPORT) If we are going to DEMONSTRATE VALUE, how do we plan to do so? How do we invest in new services that respond to changes in how research is conducted, how can we plan for them adequately so that they will thrive. In the ITHAKA report on the right, there's an important quote: Much attention is given to making material available and very little attention is given to doing the work to make sure that people will become aware of it, that they can find it, andif they do find it that they will actually use it. We find that few digital resource projects have devoted substantial financial or intellectual resources to understanding user needs, preferences and behaviors.[TRANSITION TO NEXT SLIDE]
This quote from Ithaka is based on a report about “online academic resources,” and seems to focus primarily on researcher-led projects. But, this rings true for many of us in libraries too.Libraries good at identifying space to innovate and try things out. But taking the step from innovation and experimentation to long-term sustainability is not something most of us figured out. The old missions aren't going away and the budget isn't growing. Perception: libraries can't make hard decisions When in doubt, we must return to what is best for our users. Our work is intended to help us clarify what that may be.
We are presenting a structured and disciplined approach for making decisions about creating and maintaining new scholarly communication services in research libraries. The goal is to provide libraries with tools with which to determine whether and how to create a new service. There are very good tools from other environments that can be adapted to research libraries. The non‐profit and business worlds are oriented toward the creation of successful services and products—whether success is defined as more people served or more profit accumulated. Non-profits and businesses are less wedded than we are to services and products that make no impact and cannot be sustained, because they will not meet organizational goals for success (we continue to provide services long after our customers stop valuing them). Library leaders are well advised to adapt tools that promote more disciplined decision making. As Jim Collins wrote, “A culture of discipline is not a principle of business; it is a principle of greatness” (Collins, 2005).This approach enables libraries to determine their and their parent institutions’ readiness for new services and service models, to better position the library for success. It provides a model of service or business case development, to support informed decision making and service building, as well as a model for the service planning cycle, to promote sustainability over time. The ideal toolkit should be both practical and portable.
Determining organizational climate and capacity is an important first step in successful planning for new ventures. Are new services such as publishing or data management and curation a natural fit for a particular library or university? Are your organization and institution entrepreneurial in their cultures, or will you need a radical culture shift in order to be successful?A non-profit social entrepreneurship model [Brinckerhoff,2000] can be adapted to enable libraries to effectively assess their and their parent institutions’ readiness for the creation of a business case. Determining organizational readiness is a four-step process…1. Understand if you are mission-ready: Are you looking at services that fulfill the mission, or are you off in the weeds?2. Know your risk tolerance. Is even the possibility of failure more than your culture can take?3. Determine outcomes that will promote impact and sustainability. Talk about impact and revenue from the very beginning if you want to build something sustainable.4. Make sure that you can put resources in the right places. If the basic building blocks aren’t in place, can you put them there? Or is every cow sacred?
Do preliminary ideas regarding new library service ventures fit into the library’s overall mission? Do proposed new services fit within the overall culture both of the library and university at large? Will they be in line with any consortial or other cooperative agreements already in place? And, will new ventures be politically feasible in applicable statewide or regional contexts, or beyond? The mission statement should be scrutinized to allow for new, more expansive language in order to incorporate new services or outreach to new constituencies. On the other hand, a balance should be preserved by creating more inclusive language that at the same time does not sacrifice the library’s unique service niche or dilute its brand identity.Once the mission review is completed, library leadership should consider how comfortable it is with assuming the risks inherent in new business development.What is the tolerance for such entrepreneurial activity in the broader university, and, in some cases, university system, environment? Further considerations include whether the university has set limits on investment in new services, especially if they will entail medium or long-term sunk costs.Fundamentally, does the organizational culture reward risk-taking, or is it difficult to implement and sustain new ideas? Academic libraries often seek investment through grant opportunities, but is there a reasonable expectation that either permanent funding will be secured at the end of the grant period or that, once established, a new service will be self-funded and revenue generating? Does the university administration understand that, in a non-profit context, outcomes for business ventures should be a “mix of mission return and financial return” (Brinckerhoff, 2000)? And how will the library measure and demonstrate a venture’s “soft” mission oriented rewards additional to its financial return?
The library is a social enterprise. As such, it must balance dual values: economic value and social value(Alter, 2003). This balance requires that services have both “high mission impact” and “high viability,” with viability equating with profitability (Allison & Kaye, 2005). This will help prepare planners to later identify impact and revenue strategies for sustainability within the case development phase. In assuring that mission return and financial return are discussed early in the planning process—before idea generation and creating a case for specific new services—library leaders will encourage an understanding that any subsequently developed project goals should explicitly refer back to mission, a precaution against a common mistake among non-profits of developing lucrative services that can’t be justified within the context of their correspondingly neglected social mission. A basic environmental scan should be undertaken to determine if the library and university have sufficient physical, human, and financial resources available to consider embarking on new initiatives at the present time. In particular, new service planners will need to be able to justify the critical question of opportunity: why is the moment opportune for the proposed service? A “readiness checklist” from social entrepreneurship (Brinckerhoff, 2000) can be adapted to divide resources into systems, skills, space, and finance categories. These form an outline for the institutional environment scan. Once the environmental scan is complete, it is time to develop a business case to see if and how a service can be created.
A business case is very different from a business plan. A business plan lays out how an organization will step through a project or business. A business case is a structure for understanding and explaining what will happen if an organization decides to take a particular course of action.Business case development provides a structure for learning what needs to happen for a new service to be successful and sustainable.There are multiple steps involved in developing a business case. Their value lies in the fact that they require you to decide what success should look like, to examine all of the possible options, and to identify what potential risks are, so that they can be managed. Developing the business case empowers the library to demonstrate how a service will promote the parent institution’s goals. That strengthens the library’s role in a fragile environment.Be flexible in working through a business case. If you are planning a major new service, take time and walk through all of the steps. If you are looking at something very modest, or tweaking an existing service, you can move through the steps quickly.
The outcome statement describes the scope of possible service solutions. It also begins the process of tying the development of a service to institutional goals and mission and identifying the desired impact that the library seeks to achieve through the new program. Outcome statements should reference key library or institutional metrics, strategic goals, or other signature institutional initiatives.At this point, the outcome statement should be very broad, as options have not been identified or analyzed. (It won’t look like a “smart” objective)Examples: The Library will provide data management services to assist the University in meeting its 2020 goal of opening its infectious disease research data to scholars around the world. The Library will provide digital publishing services to enable the College to showcase faculty scholarship.Once the basic outcome statement is identified, planners should brainstorm every option for action, including “do nothing”. This is especially important if the goal is to develop a major new service. Checking in with key stakeholders and advisors at the outset will enable the library to align its ideas with institutional thinking—imperative to get buy-in early, especially if a large institutional investment will be needed.A small number of high-impact, high-viability options should be selected and thoroughly analyzed. This will require gathering data to answer the following questions:What are the benefits, viability, and costs of each option?Can sustainable and scalable services be achieved on a local basis, or should the library try to build an interinstitutional solution?How long would it take to implement and attain the benefits of each option?
After reviewing the analyzed options, varying degrees of scalability, sustainability, costs, and impact among the different options should be clearer. The best possible option—one that provides the best balance of these variables—should be selected.Risk is inherent in any course of action. It is best managed and mitigated when clearly identified—risk will remain, but it is known and can be lived with. To understand and weigh the risks that come with any specific service implementation, the following sets of questions are helpful:Does the information listed in your environmental scan demonstrate that needed resources are available? Can they be reallocated and deployed?What will happen if important milestones are not met? Or if the service becomes so successful that it gets bigger than planned?Does the proposed business model fit the institutional culture?Does success or failure adversely affect anyone in the institution?Risk mitigation will most likely require enlisting the expertise outside the library, such as that of a university finance officer, the university’s general counsel’s office, or an industry consultant. Another key step in risk mitigation is moderating the objectives. Best-case impacts, timeframes, cost projections, staffing factors, and other estimates should all be recalculated. The overriding question that should be asked is Can this succeed? Best case scenarios rarely do.If the risks are insurmountable, pick another option.Now go back and rewrite the outcome statement to include the course of action that has been selected.Example:The library will create a distributed data management service in conjunction with the other Rocky Mountain Native Species Research Consortium libraries to enable efficient data harvesting, sharing, and curation for researchers within the consortium.An implementation plan now must be written that includes the action items, dates, and staff needed to get the service up and running. A written plan assures two things:1. It helps staff stay on track and provides the service markers that future assessment activities will measure.2. There are multiple people and groups who need to have a shared understanding of what is being built, what their roles are, and how the new service will meet the needs that they have expressed to the library. An implementation plan does not need to be elaborate, but it must be clear.The plan should outline action items and timelines. It must also describe the intended benefits or value that the new service will provide. This is the value proposition. A new service draws dollars, staff, time, and attention away from other activities. It also means that its intended users will need to change their current behaviors or move their work into the new service—effort on their part. Success is based upon the user’s assessment that it is worth making that effort becausethe value that results in using the new service is greater than other alternatives. Describing the value proposition in the list of benefits and value to be provided by a new service is a strong motivator for moving from plan to reality and for supplying the resources needed to make it possible.
Upon completing the implementation plan, the library planning team should determine how and when to test, or pilot, the options before proceeding with a full “rollout” (Davenport, 2009). While conducting a pilot does not guarantee successful full scale deployment, it does increase the likelihood of success by identifying problems that can be corrected and unexpected consequences to be avoided. If a pilot produces a worst case scenario, it will provide a lower-cost failure than an unsuccessful full-blown service. Politically, a pilot can also help decision makers justify the cost of a full-scale implementation. A pilot should be developed, executed, and assessed with rigor. Project management skills are required (hire or acquire them). Also, a pilot team must be given a “license to innovate”, with the pilot process thought of as a “collective investigation” and “strategic experiment,” and not just an initial implementation of a preconceived outcome. Pilot teams should be given broad boundaries and scope for creativity (Siegal & Smith, 2006). The library should give them as much room for maneuver as possible in order to facilitate a successful experiment, with “success” defined to include possible failure and project termination (Naslund, 2010). The results of a successful pilot should surface any necessary revisions of the original implementation plan. Even if the pilot was a total success, piloting is an active, adaptive process and, more than likely, unanticipated conditions had to be clarified, and glitches overcome prior to the achievement of that success. As a result, slight modifications in organization or procedures before moving to a full implementation are not uncommon (Naslund, 2010). Once a new service is built out fully, assessment and recalibration must be ongoing. This is part of the business planning cycle. Few services or products are valuable forever. Even those with a very long shelf life need to be tweaked or recalibrated to remain useful to a clientele. The history of a highly successful service will describe changes in personnel, changes in tools and formats, and even changes in customer bases. Change is the constant that allows us to adapt to the needs of our institutions.
Following the publication of our initial recommendations, we plan to produce up to six detailed case studies of services that support publishing initiatives and research data curation and management. These case studies will provide the team with an opportunity to explore the planning process and related concepts with practitioners. Based on these case studies, we will review and revise our initial finding to identify best practices for navigating the inherent uncertainty of developing sustainable scholarly communications services. We will use the planning processes outlined in our initial report and recommendations as a framework to analyze the data and structure our reporting. During our research, we expect to find a great deal of variation in how service providers planned and executed their work, which we hope will challenge and test our initial recommendations. The case study investigations will not, however, be used to test these recommendations so much as to extend and refine them. Our ultimate goal is that the cases prove useful in themselves to a readership looking for practical guidance and ideas. The case study methodology will developed to gather data on two major areas: 1) Baseline characteristics, including the nature and mission of the service; products; service models; target market(s); financial income and expenditures; staffing; etc 2) The planning and management process, including the history and origins of the service; how the mission was developed and how it relates to the parent organization's overall mission; market or demographic research process; pilots and implementation; definitions of success; assessment methods; changes in services; challenges to sustainability.
We plan to research and write up to 6 case studies. We have some ideas about where to turn, but we would like your input. Self-nominate or make a suggestion. Use the form at the URL on screen. We need balance in our study, so we’ll be choosing to ensure adequate representation of a variety of contexts, such as: · Size of library or community it serves· Single organization or collaboration/consortium oriented services· Publishing-related services and data preservation services· Revenue generating vs self-supporting/investing· Started up with grant funds or other temporary money vs all internal investmentIMPORTANT: We are not defining our role in this project as consultants to help you prepare a business case; we are looking for examples of how planning actually happens in life and what the methods we are using in our profession.
