BALANCING THE BOOKS

How the University Library System at Pitt redesigned everything from its technical services division and job descriptions to its vendor and customer relationships and employee culture to become a new organization that could adapt quickly to change – and save more than $1 million in the process. 

Rewind to 1994.  The University of Pittsburgh had an enormous library system – considered one of the nation’s major research libraries.  At that time, the library system boasted vast, world-renown collections that totaled more than 5.4 million books and papers and more than 25,000 periodical subscriptions, spread out among 15 different physical locations. And it was ranked 28th among the 108 North American universities which are members of the prestigious Association of Research Libraries.
	However, accompanying that size and stature was a capital- and people-intensive operation weighed down by insulated departmental silos, long-entrenched and traditional library practices, complacency, poor customer service and a host of inefficiencies that made the system an easy target for unstable, revolving-door leadership. Moreover, all of that didn’t position the library system well to take on the fast-emerging digital and Internet revolutions. Nor did the system sit well amidst a climate of budgetary constraints and state-funding concerns.
Enter veteran library administrator Rush Miller, who was recruited from a similar position at Bowling Green University.  There were a number of challenges awaiting Miller as he embarked on a journey to address a number of organizational challenges and to position the library system squarely for the future.
Says Miller: “They were looking for a white knight to change the place.”
	Miller says, though, he didn’t see himself as the “white knight” sort. Rather, he was just a career university librarian with a progressive, entrepreneurial philosophy that says success is all about continual change and improvement and an ability to take calculated risks. 
“I’ve always taken a business approach to managing libraries, perhaps more than other librarians,” says Miller, a large, confident man who speaks the language of business and bottom lines as well as he speaks the language of library and information sciences. “I’m somewhat of an entrepreneur.”
When all was said and done, Miller created and directed an effort to redefine the jobs of about 200 employees, break down territorial departmental barriers, adopt new technology-driven management systems, introduce outsourcing to both its staff and outside vendors, and, in the process, save at least $1.1 million in overhead. All that, and the massive changes only cost the library system three jobs.
	“What really convinced me to take this job was the opportunity to really make a difference,” Miller says. “The elements were all there for change. Yes, it was a big risk for me, but at the same time it was a big opportunity.”
	Indeed, this isn’t just a story about library reorganization. Rather, in this time of economic uncertainty and major budget cutbacks, it’s as much a profound lesson in how to embrace and effect change in an organization that has done things the same way for decades. It’s about how to effectively lead well-entrenched employees out of their insulated comfort zones and into a team-oriented future wrought with deliberate uncertainty, continuous education and revolutionary technological advances. It’s about survival.
	“In this business, you’re either moving forward or falling back,” Miller says. “If you’re in status quo mode, then you’re in a decline.”

To slash or reengineer?
	Despite its position as a major research library supported by many world-renown, scholarly book collections, the library system did find itself facing the status quo. And some of the library’s problems were readily apparent, according to James Maher, senior vice chancellor and provost (considered the chief academic officer) of the University of Pittsburgh. Maher, who led the effort to hire Miller and pushed for major improvements, says the biggest problem was that newly purchased books often remained uncatalogued for literally years because of backlogs. As a result, he says, some departments and schools remained unhappy with the library’s ability to accommodate the needs of faculty and students in a timely manner. And then there were the employees.
	“There was a very dispirited group with lots of infighting among staff,” Maher says.  “The library is an absolutely essential part of our organization. You can’t have a good university without a good library system.”
	Where to begin? Initially, Miller says, he contemplated a more traditional quick fix – one used often in the corporate world to quickly boost quarterly earnings: He thought he could simply slash about $500,000 from the annual budget. That certainly would look good to the senior administration while also trimming costly inefficiencies. But while the effort might solve some short-term problems, Miller says he realized it wouldn’t help the system in developing an entirely new culture that required constant change, process reengineering and a continuous-learning environment to deal with technology changes and better customer service. So he scrapped that strategy before he even began to make changes.
	Instead, he decided to adopt a less popular, longer-term – and some might say riskier -- strategy that went far beyond cost cutting and would take much longer to roll out. However, his strategy ultimately would create a new and nimble organization that could react quickly to the changing library environment, deal with large volumes of incoming books more efficiently – and save lots of money in the process.
Over the course of the next year, he spent most of his time talking to his employees about the need for change and its inevitability. And instead of asking department managers and others to identify areas from which to cut costs, he asked one simple – and more visionary -- question: What should the University of Pittsburgh Library System of the future look like? And that, he says, would require some much-needed strategic planning that involved the commitment of the entire staff to the process. While the fact-finding process took a long time, he says, it was far better than making rash short-term decisions that likely wouldn’t contribute to future goals.
	“It’s not about the bottom line. It’s about accomplishing goals. It’s about improving the product,” Miller says. “My key to management is to never manage the situation you’re in, but always look to the next goal. Everyone had focused on the last 20 years. I said, ‘let’s look to the future.’ You’re always going to have morale problems until you get everybody focused on the future. That became my sermon, my agenda, my theme.”
Communicating change
	Looking to the future didn’t make the process that would follow any less painful, however. As Miller, who had earned his Ph.D. in Medieval History, discovered during his year of observation, the library organization was “very hierarchical – everything was literally stove piped like a medieval castle, and communication was nearly nil. I thought it would take years to change the culture.”
	So where does one begin a process that will lead to the kind of radical change needed at Pitt’s library system? “They always say you get this vision and then you run with it,” says Jean Ferketish, a change management professional by trade and currently assistant vice chancellor for client services and organizational development at the University of Pittsburgh. “But that’s just unrealistic. When thinking about change, it’s about being flexible – you have to be responsive and proactive. It’s moving from the current state to the desired state, craven by environmental forces that might include new technology or just an intrinsic desire to get better. But nobody says ‘let’s change because it’s fun.’”
	Miller began his official change process by bringing in Ferketish to help facilitate and guide the discussions which he thought would be needed to get the “buy-in” from the employees, capture their feedback, and create a workable strategic plan. She reduces the process of organizational change into three basic phases: creating the focus, preparing for alignment and implementing the change. And all three, she says, are held together by strong, inclusive leadership with a clear vision of the future.
	Once on board, Ferketish helped Miller and his senior team create a number of specific committees, each of which was assigned to identify problems and potential solutions in certain areas of the library operation.

Key: getting everyone involved
Since the employees were librarians by profession, the first thing each of the committees did was gather materials for research, including management books and a number of human resources guides, according to Fern Brody, assistant university librarian and, at the time, the one put in charge of the committees and strategic plan. From there, the committees met regularly – “some people complained that it took up too much of their time,” she says -- and looked at everything from how information was being packaged and how customers used the library, to even the information itself.
The key, Brody says, was getting as many people as possible involved. “We realized that communication was very important to get this done, and that we had to get a lot of folks really involved,” she says. “People were realizing, though, that if they didn’t speak up and get involved, they would be left out of the plans.”
Miller says all of the discussions were very “customer-focused” and “learning organization-focused,” which meant lots of discussions about quality and excellence in service.
“We even had a whole retreat on nothing but core values, defining quality for instance,” he says. “The planning largely was geared to get people used to the fact that change is happening. Part of the old culture here – the character here – had exacerbated the situation.”
Once they got started, though, the employees eventually began to drive the change themselves, Miller notes. The result was surprising to him.
“The changes went far deeper than even I expected,” he says. “Once they got into it, they became the change agents.”
The people aspect of change, Ferketish contends, usually proves the most difficult part of any reorganization – which also includes the processes themselves as well as the technology needed to facilitate the change -- to overcome. “Do they know what’s expected of them? Do they have the skills, and is there an opportunity for feedback?” she asks. “When change comes, it creates uncertainty, so what typically lags is the people side. After all, these people are asked to do things that are outside their comfort zones. So [this part of the process] is kind of like choreography – a dance. It’s not linear.”
Ferketish says Miller and his staff had to realize that some people are more detail-oriented than others and therefore need more specific guidelines for change, while others might see things more conceptually and can handle the many ambiguities that can accompany change. Some like structure, and others prefer less structure.
“As librarians, most of the people there were specific and structured,” she says, noting that Miller, though a librarian, could be described as more ambiguous and less structured in the way sees and manages things – the typical entrepreneurial personality.

Resistance to change
Not everyone fully embraced Miller’s vision for change. Says Paul Kohberger, who had been appointed head of the system’s technical services division as the reorganization began and became a key change agent in the process: “In general, the employees were comfortable with the way things had been done in the past, although the University Library System had been going sideways for years. There were a lot of entrenched people. So the staff was very scared. Uncertainty was very apparent.”
And so was their fear of the future. “There hadn’t been much strategic thinking before, and there had been a prejudice against the notion of this being a business thing because we weren’t a business,” Brody says “There was this fear that there was a hidden agenda – that they just wanted to change their jobs.”
Even the ever-optimistic Miller acknowledges that getting widespread support for his strategic transformation efforts proved the most challenging part of the process, but he didn’t let it get in the way of progress. “I never had or will have 100 percent participation, but there has never been a revolution by majority,” he says.

Now, what to change?
	Not wanting to simply begin cutting costs – which typically would begin with major layoffs, Brody and her committees narrowed the scope of focus to three areas: technology, customer service and book collections. How was the University Library System taking advantage of high-speed inventorying and archival computer software – or revolutionary Internet applications, for instance? Was it serving its customers – faculty and students – as effectively and efficiently as it could? And was it managing its expansive book collections in a way gave fast and easy access to its customers? It didn’t take the committees long to answer such questions – and therefore see the need for major changes in the operation of the entire library system and the mindset of its staff.
But the primary target of those three issues was narrowed to one very large and cumbersome division: technical services.
	“While going on, we realized that the technical services departments were the most backward-looking, tradition-bound drains on the organization,” Miller concedes. “The resistance to change and problems – those issues mostly focused on technical services.”
	At its peak, the technical services operation employed an estimated 70 people, spread out over as many as nine different departments. At that point, staffers handled all new-book orders and special collections, cataloguing all books not only according to author, but also topics and subtopics, general categories and even specific, key-worded descriptions.
From a traditional librarian mindset, such attention to detail was crucial to effectively manage the large number of books in the system’s many scholarly collections. But from a practical, customer service-oriented perspective, such perfectionism resulted in an inflated budget and piles of new books not making it into the hands of customers for months or even years after the system acquired the books. 
Kohberger, now head of technical services, says the library system typically acquires at least 10,000 new books a month. And if a new collection came into the library that required, say, a librarian fluent in Hebrew or Polish, the system would simply hire a new person to do it. The result of both the do-it-yourself philosophy and its attitude of cataloguing perfection became all too apparent; expenses in that department skyrocketed, and thousands of books sat in a warehouse, entangled in cataloging red tape.
	“One of the biggest problems was that it took a very long time after the purchase of a book to get it on the shelf,” Maher acknowledges.
The question, Miller says, came down to whether perfect and extensive cataloguing was more important than getting the books to the end-users.
But, says Kohberger, who started working at the library system in 1968, “That’s the way they had always operated. They now had to understand that the business environment was changing. So our first goal was to reorganize ourselves and change our philosophy.”

The outsourcing vendor relationship
That meant focusing less on perfection at any cost and more on getting the books on the shelves quickly, according to Miller. While high-quality catalog records remained important, he says he believed that it was more important “getting the book on the shelf in half the time and making books more accessible to students faster.”
To get books to the shelves faster, the staff determined that technical services could operate much more efficiently and cost-effectively by embracing the notion of outsourcing. So it turned to one of its large book vendors for help.
Today, Pitt’s library system has reduced its vendor numbers to one major book distributor, which saves on paperwork and limits any issues of protocol and standards to one source. Moreover, Miller, with assistance from Kohberger and his staff, has been able to negotiate an interactive relationship with the distributor in which the distributor catalogues all books and provides standardized electronic records – based on parameters set up by the library system itself -- even before they reach the library system. The deal was negotiated on a per-book basis, with certain quantity guarantees, and also included a bulk discount on guaranteed book purchases. The bottom-line result was that books made it to the shelves – and therefore to the end-users – in a fraction of the time that they had in the past, and the necessary staffing in that division was reduced to less than 30 employees.
For the book distributor, the deal helped create a new value-added service and source of revenue that it hadn’t had previously.

Removing bureaucratic obstacles
Making the operations more efficient also allowed for a reduction in departments with the various library system divisions. And that meant fewer bureaucratic obstacles for employees who previously had to follow a steep chain of command just to get information or a decision within one’s own department, let alone from a colleague in another department. Without those barriers – and with a new culture of communication at all levels among separate departments, employees now could collaborate more freely with others to improve additional processes

The newly adaptable learning culture
To accommodate the major changes in technical services as well as the rest of the library, Brody says the library’s leadership likewise needed to transform the staff into a more flexible, cross-trained “learning organization.”
“We tried to foster a learning organization, one that fosters continuous learning,” Brody says. “Our attitude now is, ‘we won’t be the best if we’re not willing to keep learning and growing and exploring new resources. That may have been a shock to a few people, but to keep our staff, they had to keep growing, and most people welcomed the opportunity.”
So far, much of the learning has centered around technology – “what we weren’t doing and what we needed to get,” Brody recalls. “We determined that all of our staff could use a set group of applications, so training was opened to everybody. The idea was that, even if they didn’t think they needed it, it was good to know what it was.”
Such a cross-trained, flexible skill set became all the more important when the senior management of the library made what perhaps was its most significant change: redesigning all staff job descriptions to accommodate the library of the future. Rather than simply adapt the library’s traditional staffing structure to the new ways of doing things there, new jobs were designed to staff the new organization. Then the employees, in essence, reapplied for the new positions. All told, while many employees wound up in new positions, the library eliminated only three positions when all was said and done.
That repositioning, Brody contends, has duly positioned the staff to continually re-evaluate how things are working and how they might be able to make things better or different.
“Now we can sit back and say, ‘What would we do if…,’” she says. “Looking back, it’s kind of amazing.”

The big payoff
The cost savings from that major change in organization proved unprecedented at Pitt. All told, it saved the library system an estimated $1.1 million in overhead costs – far more than the original $500,000 target. The technical services division shrunk to three large units and only 27 employees, with only three people losing their jobs directly as a result of the reorganization and the remainder through attrition. The small net reduction in staff, Miller says, was the result of making sure any available positions in other library departments were offered to displaced library workers first.
In addition, the staff now is equipped with both the knowledge and attitude to adjust quickly to any new changes that come along in the future.
They were drastic changes, indeed, but necessary, Kohberger says. “My perspective is, if we had been more open to change and had investigated change all along, then the radical reorganization wouldn’t have had to happen.”
Perhaps an even more interesting result of the changes is that the university’s administration has since shown a willingness to reinvest much of the cost savings back into the newly efficient library operations, funding innovative programs that the system could manage only after the reorganization. The library system now has a new state-of-the-art storage and archiving facility, book preservation equipment, more computers and a host of new scholarly book collections, among other additions.
“It’s certainly better,” says Maher. “It’s a model for change for a couple of reasons. First, it demonstrates good performance of a crucial unit on which all units of the university depend. Second, the change was made in a very cost-effective way, and the emphasis was on improving performance. It was so cost-effective that we didn’t spend any money on the reorganization.”
Miller says he couldn’t be happier about the outcome of the transformation. “We’ve been rewarded greatly for doing it,” he says. “The administration now has a trust in us that, if they give us the resources, we will make a positive influence on our faculty and students. The students and faculty now are at the center of everything we do.
	“I wanted cultural change,” Miller says, “but I didn’t anticipate it happening so quickly. I thought it would be a 20-year thing.”