Compiled by Amy Affelt, Illinois Chapter, Business & Finance Division

Future Ready Toolkit

This post is from SLA’s new Future Ready Toolkit. The Toolkit was constructed by SLA members who have drawn upon substantial professional experience and alignment research to help you hone your skills in a way that is relevant and global. The toolkit is collaboration, alignment, adaptation, and community put into action.

Value-Added Intelligence

The knowledge that we provide is correct, citable, and on-point.  We deliver this knowledge on-time, in the format that the requestor finds most helpful, and either under or as close to budget as possible.

Facilitation of Good Decision-Making

We do this by gathering, organizing, and sharing high quality and highly-relevant information to ensure that the best decisions are made by our stakeholders.

Creation of a Culture of Knowledge Sharing

We do this by educating our colleagues on the best use of information sources (which are the most credible, most citable, etc.)

Creation of a Competitive Advantage

We do this by applying expert analysis to ensure that our stakeholders have the exact information they need to gain insight, understand trends, and secure an advantage over their competitors.

Expert Analysis

We go beyond “rip and ship” to inform the strategy of the organization by packaging results in such a way that sets the context for their use.  The knowledge that we provide ultimately reflects and enhances the organization’s overall goals.

Trend Identification and Insight

We look for trends across all industries and consider how those trends can be applied to our own work environments.  We anticipate the future by considering the present.  We read the news so that our stakeholders don’t have to, and we share developments immediately with stakeholders and in convenient formats such as through mobile applications.

Bottom-Line Benefits

Our work benefits the bottom line by saving stakeholders time and money.  We can conduct research more quickly and easily and achieve higher quality results than those with other job functions.

Context and Analysis for Knowledge and Results

We turn the information that we uncover into knowledge by setting the context for it as well as providing analysis of how it relates to the stakeholder’s challenge.  The stakeholder uses the knowledge we provide to ensure positive outcomes for the organization.

Amy is the chair of the SLA Public Relations Advisory Council, the Alignment Ambassador for the SLA Business and Finance Division, and director of database research at CompassLexecon, an economic consultancy.  She has a BA in History, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MLS from Dominican University. Amy is coordinating the Future Ready Toolkit.

Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University

I was pleasantly surprised to become aware of the Future Ready 365 blog, and I’ll look forward to acquiring some good ideas from colleagues who are confronting the challenge of building a sustainable, resilient library. I’ve been writing and speaking about future-proofing for approximately the past two years, and have shared a number of ideas for ways in which librarians in all sectors of the profession can create libraries that are ready for whatever the future might hold. I first became interesting in pursuing this topic when I was asked to contribute to Library Journal’s issue on “Future Proofing Your Library”. I wrote:

Adopting new skills and new techniques to our work will help, but I also advocate that library workers need to take a whole new approach to how they identify problems and develop the right solutions. Design thinking is all about being a “problem finder” and then thoughtfully developing, in playfully creative ways and in teams of border-crossing professionals, appropriate solutions. A significant challenge for library workers is keeping up with user expectations. If we fail to provide our users with an experience that meets their expectations, then we lose, and in a hypercompetitive and hyperconsumptive society, that can be the greatest challenge to our long-term viability.

We must use design thinking to create great library experiences for our users, because when people can get their information anywhere, all that can differentiate our libraries is the unique experience we can deliver—but it must be based on personal relationships, it must deliver meaning to the user, and it must be well designed.

Any number of strategies may contribute to the librarian’s effort to create a future ready library. I offer a dozen such strategies in my article “Fit Libraries Are Future-Proof.” Some of the strategies are inspired by library practitioners; others come from for- and non-profit industries. The overarching philosophy that unites them is the design thinking approach, seeing oneself as a professional who brings intentional design to creating a future ready library. The point is that becoming future ready or future proof requires more than the occasional random actions and occurrences that move us forward incrementally. It demands intentional design. I hope others will take the time to follow the links in this post to learn more about design thinking and how it can contribute to a creating a fit library that is ready for anything the future throws our way.

Steven Bell is the Associate University Librarian at Temple University. He blogs at Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog, and Designing Better Libraries, and is coauthor of Academic Librarianship by Design. Learn more about his ideas on design thinking and user experience at stevenbell.info/design and http://dbl.lishost.org. You can follow Steven Bell at http://twitter.com/blendedlib.

by Arik Johnson, Competitive Intelligence Division

At Aurora’s last leadership retreat in October 2010, one of the clients who so generously flew in to help us fine-tune our offerings was sharing how his staff was about to contract dramatically at year-end. This CI (competitive intelligence) director was looking for help identifying ways he was going to replace two key people that were leaving by the end of the year, one by choice, the other by compulsion.

We discussed the specific CI-related activities each of these staff were dedicated to, work such as newsletter preparation and answer-desk support, pre-analytics prep and information acquisition, vendor project management and workforce dissemination. As these two very different position descriptions filled out, I realized that, the work itself had striking similarities with another profession with which I’m becoming familiar these past few years through my association with SLA’s CI Division: Special Librarian, a.k.a., “Info Pro”.

The tasks themselves weren’t as much at issue as the desired outcomes and value these positions were tasked with creating as critical components of the larger CI team. In a nutshell, that amounted to contributing finished, actionable intelligence products that would help build a more holistically savvy workforce and culture of intelligent competitive advantage at a fast-growing, privately-held company where the chief intelligence officer of the company was two steps from the CEO and the rate of change (and uncertainty) continued to grow.

What was my advice?

“You need a librarian,” I said. But I elaborated: not two librarians either; one librarian, a “special librarian” embedded in your CI team, with liaison access to your information center resources to enable you to scale and centralize the research done throughout the rest of the company. Librarians know about all the things I just learned these other two team members do for the company. So, why not consolidate that work in a single individual specially trained for that kind of work. Better yet, there’s an abundance of talent available right now to get this work done.

What’d the client say?

“Hmmm…. You know what I think? I think you’re exactly right.”

Arik Johnson is the founder and chairman of Aurora WDC, where he works with organizations of all kinds to develop their intelligence apparatus to anticipate, monitor, detect and interpret change in their business environment.