Obnoxious Librarian from Hades (4 page)

It’s Monday, a little after lunch and my creativity is working overtime. This morning my manager told me he had a big, important assignment for me that would look good on my resume. Well, it turned out that an industry IT event was taking place and the chief IT manager was invited to speak about our company’s web 2.0 strategy. Since the chief IT was occupied on that day (a golf clinic has priority of course), the assignment was delegated to the senior IT strategy manager. Who delegated it because it wasn’t prestigious enough. And so, after several levels of delegation I was asked to present about “web version 2, portals, content mess ups and other interesting stuff to show how fab we are in Hades”. And then they trusted me to put together a presentation, which would not need approval as long as I did not reveal secrets.

Ah well. I put everything on hold for this important assignment. I shut the door of the library (sign on the door with “library closed for MARC
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 records audit”). I then gave everyone all permissions on the document management system, so no one would bother me to request permission for folders and documents. I redirected all my e-mail, phone and instant messaging to my passive aggressive assistant Sue, who will reply to everything very friendly like: “that is your problem”, “that is not of your concern” and “did you check Google?”

So after several cappuccinos, the entire Bill Joel box set and a bag of M&M’s, here’s my outline for the presentation titled “Portal to Hades: the future of business driven strategic information and service architecture synergies”:

1. Hades will speed up performance reviews by automatically creating profiles of the employee’s performance. In one report, the supervisor can see

- The amount of e-mail sent and received, split per topic and automatically classified as personal or business;

- Candid photos of the employee’s behavior at office parties;

- A summary of their Internet search history;

- And a breakdown of their Internet download activity;

2. Work-life balance is a core value for Hades. We want our employees to focus on their personal development, linked to Hades business priorities. Finding a partner is a very time-consuming and stressful activity, which we would like to facilitate. All 145,842 employees of Hades are already listed in the corporate directory. This directory will be expanded with information on salary, benefits, hobbies, pictures and relationship status (single, married, married but looking etc).

With a few clicks of a mouse, our employees can find a match within the company and save valuable time and energy. This also supports our goal of cross-business and cross-region relationship building.

3. All information tools will be migrated to clunky web versions, with far less functionality and less stability. However, they will be given web 2.0 names (Grmbl, Yikes, OhYeaH for example) and end users will be able to put them in widgets on their desktop. To complete the web 2.0 vibe, the widgets will be in forever beta and not supported by central IT.

It is Tuesday afternoon, 3.45 PM in the library and I am preparing myself for my weekly “surplus library and archive equipment inventory”. Which is less boring than it sounds… I’ll let you in on a secret.

I was hired several years ago for the corporate library position at Hades Corporation because the librarian at the time was close to retirement. He had been in that position for 40 years and basically built the library, book-by-book, budget dollar for budget dollar. Nobody really knew how the library worked as the librarian was quite secretive about it.

So when I was hired to take over, one of the main tasks assigned to me was to find out how everything worked, since no process was documented and the librarian kept every file locked in his desk. The library catalog was only accessible on his computer, so everyone had to call him to get information. But he didn't mind that people called him, it helped him know what was going on in the company, he said. And he was always there, never a day off (“I don't have a wife, and I like my job”) or a day ill (“books keep you healthy”).

Within the first week I realized that the cloud of mystery around the library served the librarian well. Nobody really bothered him, since no one really knew what he was supposed to do except handling search requests and making sure the books and journals were available … .)

The librarian had cleverly worked out a dual reporting structure, reporting both to IT and facility services. This worked in his advantage, as every time one department wanted something changed, the librarian claimed that the other department did not agree. Since the IT manager and the facility services manager were not on speaking terms, they never agreed to meet in order to align their needs for library services.

Since he never asked for large investments, never raised issues or even showed the slightest hint of wanting to change, the librarian became something of a stealth persona – flying under the radar of any management attention or reorganization.

I was, of course, very young and full of ideas. Seeing how old fashioned the library at Hades was, my head was full of innovations and I submitted memo after memo to management with challenges and future visions. The old librarian politely smiled every time he read one of my memos and slowly shook his head: “let me tell you, in all of my 40 years I have never bothered management and therefore they never bothered me.”

After a few weeks we built a relationship of trust, as he knew he was leaving and I would take over. Every day he would tell me more about how things worked, or why not. He started to bring me to every meeting and introduce me as his successor, except for one. Every week on Tuesday afternoon at 4 PM, he would excuse himself and tell me he was going make an inventory of surplus archive and library materials for donation to the third world. I did not understand how he could do this every week and I still had not seen a single box ready for shipment to developing nations.

When I asked him about this appointment, he smiled in his little grey beard, his eyes twinkled behind his glasses and he told me: “I will tell you once the time is ready”.

On his very last day, I was very curious to learn about this weekly inventory. He took me down to the basement, where the paper archive was kept. He opened the doors of the archive and walked along the shelves of files and archive boxes. At the end of the section “tax receipts 1990-1999” he stopped. I noticed that behind that cupboard was a small door, almost the same color as the wall. The sign on the door said: “surplus archive and library materials”. With a small key, he opened the door and let me in… .

It was a very small room, cleverly hidden at the end of the archive. The room was just big enough to contain a leather chair, a small table with a record player, a small wine rack and a bookcase filled with classics in leather bound volumes. The old librarian smiled at me: “This is where I have been doing my inventory for over 30 years, the one reason that kept me sane in this organization and why I never became ill. Consider this the gift of a secret from an old librarian to a young librarian, use it as you see fit.”

So in honor of old librarians, I have continued the old tradition. Every week I go down to the basement, lock the door, play some old jazz and toast to old librarians who never shall die…

It is Wednesday afternoon, 2.24 PM in the library and I am playing Pink Floyd’s “Money” in a loop. This morning all service departments were gathered in a town hall session with our managers for a “Ban out unnecessary costs” session. Yes, it was as bad as it sounds.

First we got an overview of how much money was spent on luxuries like furniture, coffee, cleaning and catering. In Hades’ constant drive to make even more money for our poor shareholders, the focus is not on selling better products or delivering better services to customers – it seems the key is in eliminating all costs. So a relentless cost cutting effort (I think it is the 6th in little over 2 years) has been launched. In the past we had to submit endless spreadsheets with all the costs and then spend many hours explaining why something was done, why it was done this way and how we already did it in the most cost efficient way (of course previous cost cutting exercises were never evaluated).

Well, actually I just created one spreadsheet with made up numbers and used that in all the projects, as every time the team composition changed anyway. And since I am the only one with access to the library back-end systems for all the numbers, it is hard to contradict me.

But this time I need to come up with something new: the assignment is to document how much we can deliver for half our budget. Then management will decide whether we can get by with half of the services or half the level of service. Perhaps half is good enough….

Of course I am fully willing to participate in any effort to help my organization cut costs. As long as it does not interfere with the library. This crazy cost-cutting idea must be killed before someone really thinks this has any future. So instead of documenting what half the library budget will deliver, I will actually start doing it. Happy to be a shining example for the rest of the organization by taking end-to-end responsibility for a true cost saving effort. I’ll bet this project will be killed before we get to lunch tomorrow.

As of tomorrow I give you “half the library”:

- The intranet will only be available every other minute;

- Every other page in newly scanned reports will be blank;

- We serve staff with names starting with A-K on Monday and Wednesday. Staff with names starting L-Z will be served on Tuesday and Thursday. On Friday we will serve staff at random (as we please);

- Links to reports and articles may or may not work depending on a daily flip of a coin;

- The automatic library door will only open for every other person on half the speed. Occasionally it may also just open halfway;

- Requests for books with an even ISBN
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 number will be served in even weeks; odd ISBN numbers will be served in the odd weeks;

- You have a chance of 1 in 2 to get through to the library by phone or e-mail;

- For every literature search request, only even or odd literature references will be delivered.

Money, its a crime

Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie

Money, so they say

Is the root of all evil today
(Pink Floyd, “Money”(c) 1973)

It is Tuesday morning, 11.26 AM in the library and I feel good about being a good, law abiding citizen, a rule obeying Hades employee and overall an obnoxious librarian.

Yesterday I was called into a meeting with my manager and the business opportunity consultant (I’d prefer to call him the b.s. consultant) to discuss our portfolio of electronic journals and databases. Or to be more precise: can we do more with even less money?

That seems to be the business equivalent of the philosopher's stone: how to turn inexpensive items into gold. Or at least something shiny.

I explained how we are already saving money by using economies of scale. We have centralized on several publisher e-journal packages, which in the past were many smaller licenses. This has lead to better discounts, one point of negotiation and only one invoice to manage (and monopolistic publishers only have us over a barrel once). But I should have known that it is never enough to save money until your budget is zero and I start doing my job as a volunteer (of course working for Hades is a constant cycle of joy, happiness and life enriching experiences, so why pay me?).

Well, luckily the opportunity consultant was a real expert on the topic of electronic journals and he was full of ideas:

“Using out-of-the-box thinking, industry best practices and our consultancy firm’s proprietary knowledge base, I have several great opportunities for Hades Corp. in this exciting area. Each of these opportunities is a perfect balance between value enhancement and cost saving, and of course I get paid for every stupid idea I can sell to you guys.”

Well, actually he did not say that last part. But I saw him thinking it.

I will summarize for you the wonderful opportunities presented to me in all PowerPoint glory, with the aim to reduce our spending on the e-journal portfolio:

1. Cancel all e-journal subscriptions and move completely to document delivery. All document delivery will be outsourced to a cost advantageous country. All requests will require a signed off business case by a senior manager.

(The “Let’s make it impossible” scenario)

2. Cancel all e-journal subscriptions and use the wonderful treasures of freely available information on the web.

(The “Let’s dumb down research” scenario)

3. Cancel all e-journal subscriptions and take up paper subscriptions again, this time delivering them to a Hades office in a cost advantageous country which does not acknowledge copyright. Then we can scan all journals there and store them in the corporate document management system.

(The “Copyright? What copyright?” scenario)

When opportunity 3 was presented I stood up and applauded, as I recognize a legal disaster when I see one. I thought about pretending to wipe a tear from my eye, but I was afraid that would be pushing it. With a lump in my throat I asked the consultant to send me the PowerPoint presentation of this opportunity set so I could follow up on this paradigm shifting insight.

And I did follow up. By forwarding it to the legal department of Hades. So that is why my manager and the business opportunity consultant are in a mandatory disciplinary 4 hour meeting with the corporate lawyers from HQ and I scored a brownie point with the lawyers. Lesson learned: you should always keep the lawyers on your side, even if it means sacrificing someone else.

It is Wednesday afternoon, 4.15 PM in the library and I am doing my Zen exercises as preparation for a meeting with the Software, Hardware and Infrastructure Technology International board (usually nicknamed shitty). After months of requirements gathering, market scans, stakeholder mapping, stakeholder management, stakeholder engagement, stakeholder consensus shoot-outs, requirements mapping, architecture design, architecture redesign, architecture landscape design, interface mapping, forward and backward compatibility testing, benchmarking and the usual coffee, late nights and teeth grinding I am now ready to ask final approval for the upgrade of our library and records management systems.

I pick up my binders with all the supporting documentation and head down to the conference room. The secretary of the board is outside and warns me that I am the next one on the schedule. The board consists of wise men and women who have been selected to veto about whether or not to authorize spending of IT related budget. The main requirement for being selected on the board is not having any practical knowledge or expertise about IT. Actually, I even think that most of the board members not even use a computer, as they have one or more secretaries for menial work. They are busy hopping from meeting room to meeting room defending their pet projects, squashing other’s pet projects, inventing new buzz words and “thinking out of the box”.

The door opens and the previous applicant for IT budget spending comes out, covered in sweat and a bewildered look in his eyes. The secretary shoves me in while quickly whispering: “They are running late, so keep it short and speak only when spoken to.” I wanted to ask whether it was safe to look the board members straight in the eye, but she had already closed the door behind me.

I sit down and face the jury.

“So, well, well, what have we here… a software upgrade for library and records management software” begins the head of finance, who acts as the chairman this time. “I did not know we needed a library, as we can find, store and file everything ourselves, I thought… but okay, I see all the boxes have been ticked for this request. So let’s get this over with. Does anybody have any objections?”

The rest of the board now starts reading the proposal, as none of them have read the required pre-reading materials (that would influence their ability for out of the box thinking).

I am crossing my fingers and hope I will get permission, as I’d like to get out of this meeting before 5 so I can get back to my desk to update my blog. But then the senior auditor says “hmmm”. I do not like “hmmm”, as usually it is followed by trouble [insert 'Jaws' theme here].

The senior auditor taps his finger on the proposal: “Hmmm, this seems to be software that can be used across the Hades corporation in every country. Chairman, if you remember, we specifically introduced a requirement that proposals for software that is to be used globally, at least 50% of the budget funding should come from a different region of our corporation to demonstrate global buy in.”

NO!

I'd like to jump over the conference table and pummel him with my first edition of the Dewey biography, but instead I sigh and address the senior auditor: “Of course I have read all the rules, but as you know there is only one library in Hades– so there can be no other regional funding from a different library.”

“Well, dear librarian, that is not my problem. A rule is a rule in my book. As an auditor I am nothing if not a stickler for rules. When we start making exceptions (he actually shudders when he utters that foul word) that will be the end of our corporate governance of which I am so proud. It is the foundation and future of this company.”

The chairman makes a note and tells me that either I come up with 50% of the funding from a different region of the Hades group of companies, or otherwise my proposal will not be approved.

Mmmm. This calls for an improvisation paradigm. I lock the door of the library, put a sign on the door “closed for quarterly Z39.50
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 architecture quality control” and put on my headphones. As always, the serene sounds of Spinal Tap's classic album “Break like wind” bring me into the right theta state. Brain wave builds upon brain wave as I suddenly find the right eureka moment.

I pick up the phone and quickly dial the number of my buddy Melvin in Kuala Lumpur. He manages the farm of servers that run all of Hades´ critical applications. His real ambition is to build the world's largest collection of Manga comics, so I have used my powerful library network to get him obscure Manga comics. In return, he hosts the library and records management system on one of the mega servers, guaranteeing me perfect service and total up time.

`Library dude, long time no speak – how's life?”

“Melvin, my friend, I need a favor, a suit is blocking my plan to upgrade my systems. I need 25 grand from you.”

“Wow, hey, you know you are on my special list, but I don't have spare budget I can give you.”

“Well, Melvin – I know that. Corporate politics is just a game, so let's just play a little game of Monopoly to beat the suits at their game of tic-tac-toe. I have a budget of 50.000 dollars for this software upgrade, but I need 25.000 of that to come from a different region. You have never invoiced me for hosting my library and records management software, right?”

“No, of course not, you're a pal and your systems don't consume any CPU power or bandwidth worth charging you.”

“That is very nice of you, but don't you think that after all these years an invoice for your service is overdue? An invoice of say, 25.000 dollars? I will pay you for that long outstanding invoice and then you can fund half of my systems upgrade.”

“Librarian – you've got them checkmate!”

And we go back to our normal scheduled plan of world domination…