Obnoxious Librarian from Hades (11 page)

It is Thursday evening in the library and it is crowded with staff members, all in a good mood and feeling relieved after a life changing week. Let me take you back in time to explain…

A few weeks ago I ran into the Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) in the hallway, and he looked very tired and heading for a nervous breakdown. I took him to the library, put him in one of our comfy reading chairs, fetched him a cappuccino from the secret library coffee machine in the back (instead of the brown stuff coming from the coffee machines in the hallway which vaguely resembles coffee) and I asked him what was wrong.

He told me that his knowledge management progress was stalling and he could not see how to improve the knowledge sharing culture. Staff were clinging to old fashioned e-mail and kept everything to themselves instead of embracing knowledge sharing and consulting expert communities. The CKO sobbed that the board of directors had threatened to cut knowledge management completely as the bean counters did not see progress on their management dashboards.

Now, you all now that librarians are service minded. We put the customer first. I do that too - especially if it can benefit me as well. And I recognized a lot in the CKO's troubles: my colleagues would hide behind e-mail, preferably on their blackberries to "communicate" - even with co-workers in a room across the hall. Managers resorted to recording web casts and putting them on the intranet instead of meeting staff face to face - the good thing about web casts is that staff don't have a chance to criticize or comment. And e-mails are easier to ignore than a real person.

This all resulted in most employees resorting to their office or cubicle, not knowing their co-workers and certainly not using knowledge bases or consulting experts. It was easier to google for some keywords, copy & paste that into an e-mail or PowerPoint. Making a small effort to find a real person to learn from their experience or perhaps coming over to the library to discuss a literature search was too much to ask. Just last week, a colleague from one floor up set up a teleconference to discuss a new database alert profile. When I suggested he'd come down to the library and we would discuss this in person, he said he tried to meet virtually all the time as he wanted to treat everyone the same and not meet me face to face, while he could not meet face to face with his colleague in India.

With that in mind I told the CKO I would help him. In this case, desperate times call for desperate measures so I called Ivana Paichikova. She is a long-time network guru in Hades Corporation and has power over large parts of our servers and networks. We became friends when I helped her daughter with her high school homework assignments for which I supplied quite a number of articles from relevant journals. She works in one of our offices in Eastern Europe and told me she gets most of her work done via her "connections" (I never dared to ask what type of "connections" she meant, I am afraid it is more Godfather type connections rather then local chamber of commerce type of connections).

Ivana was glad to hear from me: "Librarian, good to hear from you - you need a favour? No problem. Is someone making trouble? Do you want me to make them disappear? Or should they "suddenly" opt to retire?"

I explained to hear about the CKO's troubles and my idea to drastically change employee behaviours by taking e-mail, internet access and printing offline for a few days. I hoped that such a drastic change would trigger a change in behaviour. She was silent for a moment and then agreed to help, as this offered her the chance to do some necessary upgrades which were easier to do without those pesky users being online. We agreed that during a regular backup in the weekend, somehow problems would arise which would impact our e-mail, internet and printing servers - Ivana would personally guarantee management this would be resolved as soon as possible. As nobody in headquarters had any real technical knowledge (remember off shoring and outsourcing), Ivana was sure she could stall them for a few days without real problems.

On Monday morning this week the plan started to work: all staff noticed that they could not open their e-mail, their blackberries did not work and the network was not accessible. Everything came to a grinding halt. Employees did not know what to do and tried different ways to get to their e-mail or the internet. There was a lot of gnashing teeth, frustrated clicking and cries of despair. After the initial technology related anger had subdued, people started to venture out of their offices or cubicles to look for help.

Many of the employees met around the coffee machines or in the corridor to share their frustrations. Since their computers were largely useless, staff tried to figure out how to get their work done without their office computers. Those who had personal smart phones with Internet access became the linking pin to communications with the outside world. Others who needed to communicate with different departments became daredevils and used maps to walk to other departments for meetings.

Since nobody could access their calendar, regular meetings were all cancelled. I put up a notice that the library was offering free cappuccino and seating for staff, so quickly the library became the place to have impromptu meetings. It was heart-warming to see staff connecting faces to names, meeting colleagues they only knew from e-mails and bonding over the free donuts I sneaked in.

On day 2, improvising became normal. Several colleagues brought their own desktop printers to work and offered others to print documents from USB drives if needed. Senior staff sat down with groups of interested employees to explain solutions using whiteboard and real interactive discussions. In the library staff were consulting books to acquire knowledge, discussions were held in all corners of the building to solve problems, using pieces of paper and pens to document potential ideas. I pointed employees to colleagues whom I knew would be able to help them and I offered the library meeting room to the "Blackberry addicts rehabilitation group" who ran counselling sessions all day.

Ivana and I knew we had started to change the culture in our company, so on Thursday we started to bring back network services very slowly. I posted hourly updates on the library notice board of what servers were back online, for which user groups e-mail was accessible and this really helped to bring staff together. When at 7pm I could announce that due to heroic efforts of our network support staff everything was back online, everyone cheered. And I just happened to have some good bottles of wine hidden behind the reference desk to toast…

It is Thursday afternoon in the library and I am working on one of my personal projects to make the world a better place: putting Vogon poetry to music. I have found out that combining the fine Vogon poetry with polka music played on bagpipes makes a very interesting new form of art. The elegant choice of words by the Vogons is strengthened by the bagpipe music. Oh, if only I could describe in words how the following Vogon verse sounds in surround sound bagpipe music:

Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits
On a lurgid bee
That mordiously hath bitled out
Its earted jurtles

For those those who have no clue what I am talking about, please demand half of your college tuition back and complain to your parents as an important part of your education is missing. Your homework for next week is to read Douglas Adams' "Hitchhikers' guide to the galaxy".

But I digress.

Earlier this week my customer friendliness was put to the test. The friendliness lost. Let me explain: on Monday morning I had just arrived in the library
and I was in the middle of my normal morning routine. Turning on the lights, greeting the books, turning on the coffee machine, saluting the life size statue
of Mr. Dewey and booting up the computer. I was rudely interrupted by a visitor running through the door, who was yelling at me - this already broke two of the sacred library rules. It was the senior vice president of marketing, a very loud talking man with a loud suit. He is not a a frequent user of the library, so I was surprised to see him.

"Librarian", he shouted, "I need your help!". Well, that's at least a good start.

"I have a meeting with our board of directors at 6pm about a paradigm shifting opportunity that could change the way we think about marketing. I need data, lots of it to build my case! I need facts, figures, the whole show - and you are my man. You are the knowledge gatekeeper, my fearless scout who can get me what I need!! But I need it FAST!"

I saw an opportunity here to impress a potential new customer, so I asked him: "Ok, I can help you of course - please sit down so we can discuss what you
need, so I can prepare my literature search."

"No can do, library boy, time is money - gotta run - I have a videoconference coming up about a national campaign worth a thousand times your library budget.

But get me all the info on the impact of social media on brand loyalty!"

"But you have to tell me a bit more to make sure I can find the right information… "

The marketing senior vice president shook his head and ran out the door shouting: "I trust you, just get me what I need before 5pm, so I can put it in the presentation. And remember: money is not a problem, your input is of pivotal importance for the future of marketing in this company! Gotta go!"

I realized this was a great challenge which required my full attention to pull this off. I put my passive aggressive assistant Sue at the front desk, which would make sure no phone call or real l-user (library user) would get past her.

At my desk I put on my headphones, put Tori Amos' "Tales of a librarian" album on repeat and started to do what I do best (well, at least the one thing I do best after being obnoxious): finding, filtering and analyzing information. With one click of my mouse I opened a set of thesauri and industry vocabularies so I could quickly determine which keywords to use. Woosh - I then opened the command line at my favorite database host. Quickly over to the master index of databases to find out which of the gazillion databases would be best for this search, handpicking the most relevant databases whilst keeping an eye on the costs of using them. Zoom - dive into a selected set of databases, quickly entering the perfect search query balancing the keywords, synonyms and Boolean. I gave myself a compliment for balancing precision and recall.

With complete concentration I de-duplicated all the search results, clustered them and I imported the references into my visualization software. Without breaking a sweat, I quickly identified the most relevant search results and weeded out the rest. Quickly I drank my energy drink and then I was ready for finding the full text articles from the references I found. Thanks heavens I have a fully automated link resolver installed which automatically looks up the references in the list of full text journals we have available. A smaller set was not full text available, so I used the company credit card to download them via pay-per-view.

So now all the relevant articles and reports were stored as full text documents on my pc, but I needed to analyze them in order to report back to the manager.
From my librarian's toolkit I pulled out the full text clustering engine, which indexes all the full text documents and then visualizes them on my screen. I then spent the remaining time until 4.30pm reading the relevant documents, making notes and summarizing all information into a few high-information dense PowerPoint slides.

With pride I looked at my work, this being one of the finest jobs I had ever done and under severe pressure. Knowing that I would impress the senior vice president, I knew it was worth the effort.

I put my brilliant masterpiece on my usb stick and took the elevator to the top floor, where the top management has their plush offices. I entered the office of the senior vice president of marketing, and noticed he was working on his PowerPoint presentation. I coughed to make my presence known. He looked up and seemed startled: "Oh, yes… you have some information for me?"

"Not just information, I have a brilliant summary of all the important articles, industry reports and patents related to the topics you requested. Everything neatly summarized in a handful of slides, with facts, figures and references to back it up. This will be the killer for your presentation!".

"Ah, well, you see… I did some searching myself and found some good info on a blog somewhere. So I copied that into my presentation."

"Excuse me? You prefer a blog of unknown quality and source above my professional masterpiece?"

"Well, the stuff I found was good enough - and I got it fast, it took you hours to compile your work. Really, thanks for the effort, but I'll just go with what I've got."

At that point I had steam coming out of my ears. But as my mentor always advised me: "Don't get mad, get even". 

I decided that if mister marketing thought a blog was "good enough" information for a vital presentation to the board, I'd give him "good enough" on other fronts… let's see how he liked that:

- I tweaked his personal intranet search engine to include vaguely related search results, should be "good enough";

- I worked with my buddy in e-mail support to change the spam filter settings for the managers' mailbox from "perfect" to "good enough";

- I reworked the formulas for his budget reporting on the intranet portal to round off to the nearest million;

- from now on, every official company document he files will be dumped into the "general" folder instead of exactly in the right project folder;

- I switched his Financial Times personal subscription to the local newspaper, that's "good enough" information for him…

- I changed his contact details on the intranet employee directory to "good enough": room number - somewhere on the top floor and I listed his personal home phone number as the main contact number;

- and just to be obnoxious, I listed his private cell phone number on the front page of the intranet listed under "Hades Corp HR needs your help in these times of financial constraints. Call this number anonymously to suggest which manager can be laid off without remorse in your opinion.".