I've been spending some of my time here at University Libraries trying to figure out the best means for providing information on training material, training opportunities, and technical documentation, both Libraries-wide and University-wide, so that faculty and staff at University and the campuses will not have to search for it.
In this quest to find the best place, so many questions have come up. Would it be better to use something the University is using like WikiSpaces? Would it be better to use what University Libraries is using like our CMS? Should I get a committee involved from the get-go? Should I start something and then pull a group together?
I won't bore you with all the details, but I've been doing needs assessments to get input. I've decided to do the beginnings of the site myself. (Part of our Blogs and Wikis presentation is "Better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, form a committee, and have it killed by a thousand meetings...") Then, I'll be presenting it to a larger committee for feedback and continue with my needs assessments.
Here's my rationale for this and any large project within an institution like Penn State:
Getting Started
If you work within a committee, especially a large enough one. Or one with appointees placed there mainly for political reasons rather than functional ones, you are likely to have the project never to get started.
With the amount of meetings some of us have already, I have been on some projects where the project died simply because the committee was never able to find a meeting time yet insisted on meeting face to face.
Check out what Mark Linton has to say about sabotage and committees.
Getting Buy-In
If some projects die by committee some never get the chance to breed because they were conceived in a silo. As much as I fear too many cooks in the pot, there is a danger in not involving anybody in a service that you want everybody to adopt.
Why does a departmental unit create a redundant service? Is it in answer to a feature not offered centrally? Is it because information about these services not been made readily available? Is it because they got tired of waiting for the central service's release that was held up by committee? I wonder how many redundant services and redundant employee hours we could regain be doing more needs assessment with the people we serve.
I am, of course, speaking specifically of my project with centralizing training resources across University Libraries, but these questions could be applied throughout the University. Is there a routine needs assessment for centralized services to see what features are needed, who is not using them, and why?
Do the needs assessment. Take action. Reassess periodically.
Needs assessment. Good point. Who needs what we do? Why do they need it? What is the ongoing value of that need and what is the value of the benefit gained by having it? Is it greater than zero? Can it be served better in another way? Is it already being served better in another way and what we do is redundant? Is the redundant service justified because it provides something not present in the existing service? Would it be better to add that to the existing service?
Here is another thing to think about...
When does the tool we provide become the end in itself? When did people first say, "My job is to create a Microsoft Word file?" They do that, you know. I get Word files in email — all the time — that would be better served as a web page on a wiki with an RSS feed, but aren't, because it is somebody's job to make that word file.
How do we stop our services from getting to that point? Where the needs assessment shows that the tool is needed because it is somebody's job to use the tool?
I agree, Mark, that part of the reason we have redundancy is that someone's whole workday is devoted to it. That's a scary thing to face.
Who would like to be the one to admit that the job they are doing doesn't need to be done? What would happen to that job? Would the person have to *gasp* learn something new?
Sometimes the people who have been somewhere for years feel a sense of ownership over their positions. "I've stayed here all these years because I'm comfortable with what I do, and who are you to come in and try to change it?"
Sometimes it's because they've spent too much time and money going in one direction and are afraid of admitting that while the decision they made was the best at the time, a better one would be to cut and run in a new direction.
Anyway, I feel your pain on the Word docs and would love to see a day when we all could be working out of wikis. After all, think of all that redundant space alone on mail servers, in attachment folders of individual machines, and on backups just devoted to multiple versions and multiple copies of collaborative copies that could have been centralized in a wiki!