Culture Morph

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Culture Morph

6/1/2007

By Susan D. Heid

Today, the merged team has a dozen IT workers, a dozen librarians, and one research person, all focused on unifying operations by working with each other in specific areas. Internally, each professional culture retains its individuality, and there's no push to blend those cultural aspects of the organization, says Johnson. He considers the group's mission "to deliver consistent, reliable, and secure support for the academic mission of the college."

A merged team at Rhodes College has a dozen IT workers, a dozen librarians, and one research person, all focused on unifying operations by working with each other in specific areas.

While that may sound like a technical person's take on the job, there's actually more to it. "The story begins with data capture," Johnson insists. "The way I see it, that's a shared responsibility across the campus. We capture the information. We store it securely and appropriately. Those are IT functions. But the story also is about supplementing the information with the right kinds of resources, which is a library function. The librarians' whole deal is to make sure people can find what they're looking for, and can use it appropriately."

That's where the ability to work with one another in specific areas comes in: One cross-functional team works on customer service issues, another on research and development. For example, in the area of customer service, the organization offers one point of contact for any question that relates to information services (informational or technical) and for questions coming from any campus sector (students, faculty members, staff, or visitors), whether the queries be walkins, e-mails, or phone calls.

"We train at that consolidated service point," offers Johnson. "Our people answer both library and IT questions. The customers don't need to know how we work; we train the library staff to answer at least three-quarters of technical questions likely to be asked." And when a librarian can't handle a techrelated question, says Johnson, he or she hands it off immediately to an IT person.

On the back end, the merged organization has "really paid off internally," the CIO reports, possibly because of the way technology is evolving. "As certain technologies have grown up, they really blur the boundaries of the library and IT." He cites the management of digital assets: For instance, take the case of the professor who has 8,000 slides that she wants to make accessible to people in her class, as well as to other classes and other institutions. Says Johnson, "An IT staffer may be able to tell you how to maintain the slides or store them, but he may not know anything about making them easy for anybody to find. On the other hand, librarians aren't ready to tackle the technical side of that challenge." But, "Having the group already merged, we're ready when challenges like this pop up. We don't have to rush to create a group to manage them."