A couple of years ago, I encountered this quote in one of our professional journals:
"We wanted to get out of the server management business. Our goal was to manage information, not technology."
Michael Dula, Lynne Jacobsen. Implementing a new cloud computing management service: A symbiotic approach. CIL (Computers in Libraries), Jan/Feb 2012
That struck me as wrong in a number of ways:
- The implication that it is possible to manage information without managing technology.
- The implication that getting out of the server management business gets you out of the technology management business.
- The implication that getting out of the technology management business is something libraries should want to do.
Let's take these one at a time.
1. It is possible to manage information without managing technology
To argue by analogy, to me it sounds like someone saying "I just want to manage human resources, I don't want to manage people." And who wouldn't? People are unpredictable. They call in sick. They don't always do what you ask them to. They sometimes don't all get along, and as a manager you're stuck with sorting out their conflicts. No fun. Human resources, being an incorporeal abstraction, doesn't have these problems. The problem is that incorporeal abstractions don't actually do work.
And unfortunately, 'information' is the same. It has no existence apart from its embodiment in technological artifacts, whether those artifacts exist as printed books on a shelf, microfilm in a drawer, or bits on a disc. And yes, all of these embodiments cause you, as a manager, potential headaches: books go missing, microfilm gets scratched, hard drives crash. It would be nice not to have to deal with these problems. However, that's not possible: You can't manage information and not technology any more than you can manage human resources and not also manage people.
2. Getting out of the server management business gets you out of the technology management business
What you can do, of course, is to outsource the details. You can pay HR consultants to do your HR for you, and you can pay IT consultants and vendors to run some or all of your IT infrastructure. There is nothing inherently wrong with this of course, and we all do it to a greater or lesser extent. For example, almost all of the electronic journals we license are hosted by third parties and I shed no tears over this.
But at the end of the day, contracting out the details doesn't mean that you are not still managing technology for your organization. Selecting your technology providers, regularly evaluating the services they provide, migrating from one provider to another, integrating the different components of your IT infrastructure (you didn't really think you'd get it all from one vendor, did you?), working with the vendor's technical support and possibly their developers if you need features that aren't there ... all of these constitute management activities, all are required, and none can be outsourced.
More than that, even the decision whether or not to outsource a particular component of your technology stack is also very much a management decision, and it better be an informed one, for several reasons:
- You can be in serious trouble if you neglect to follow the regulatory requirements of your particular jurisdiction (and BC has one or two interesting wrinkles in that area).
- You can wind up spending way more money than you need to for substandard service, if you don't know what you're doing or you go with the wrong provider.
- And if you're unfamiliar with the term "lock-in" you really need to look it up. Immediately.
And while there can be real benefits to contracting out, there can also be significant downsides. Vendors tend to derive their economic advantage from standardizing the service offerings they provide. As long as their standard service package meets your needs, no problem. But if you have (or later develop) business requirements that fall outside what they're prepared to deliver, you might be stuck. There's a bit of a spectrum here, but typically it's more possible to customize the behaviours of technology you run yourself. Locking yourself into a technology stack you don't control can have a serious impact on your organization's ability to adapt to change.
So you have to weigh the downsides against the upsides, and come up with a balance that will work for your organization, with the added challenge of all of this being a moving target. Sounds like technology management to me.
3. Getting out of the technology management business is something libraries should want to do
So it turns out we can't really get out of the technology management business. And you know what? That's a good thing. Because if we ever get out of the technology management business, we'll be out of business altogether.
Libraries have always been in the IT business. In fact, it's possible to argue that's the heart of our business, and it always has been, long before computers existed. Books are IT. Scrolls are IT. Look at it that way, and you can make a convincing argument that Libraries are in fact the original IT organizations.
But just because we were there first, doesn't mean we get to occupy centre stage until the end of time. As I'm probably not the first to notice, IT has changed a little bit in the past 50 or 60 years. Libraries were not particularly slow to recognize the change; we began automating parts of our operations as far back as the 1960s. But that only streamlined our traditional workflows. The technological basis of the information we were managing didn't really start to change in any serious way until around 20 years ago. And increasingly since then, the migration of information from physical artifacts to bits on discs has had a transformative effect on libraries and the skill sets needed to manage them.
Because as you might expect, the skills you need to manage bits differ greatly from the skills required to manage stacks of paper. And this realization has affected different people in different ways. My belief, shared with many of my colleagues, is that Libraries need to become modern IT organizations, which means we have a lot to learn from that branch of IT that has grown up around managing bits. I don't think this means losing our professional identity as custodians of the published record, or parts of it, for the very long term. But in order to maintain that identity with any degree of credibility, we need to engage with the realities of IT management as it is practiced now. Collectively speaking we have come a long ways, but we're not there yet. Cultural change don't come easy, and it will come harder still if we distance ourselves from those who really understand the nuts and bolts of what we're trying to do.
That's why it concerns me there are those who appear to take an opposing view: that libraries can exist in some sort of Platonic realm where information floats independently of its embodiment in technology, and somehow "manage" it without really coming to grips with the messy details. Sorry, but that's not where the action is; that's not where it will ever be; and that road, while undoubtedly less bumpy than the alternative, is the quickest way to irrelevance.