Part III: Designing and Planning Services -- Questions for discussion
- Determining value of services (Th. 16 April)
How does one assess the value of particular services to the organization?
How does one justify/rationalize expenditures for a specific service or set of services? For addition of a new service?
What guidelines and/or methods can you point to/describe for analyzing benefits?
How can one demonstrate costs involved with eliminating an existing service?
What techniques serve to insure a positive environment/attitude toward the information services unit?
Situational Possibilities:
- Top management in the organization in the search for more ways to save money wants to cut the information services budget
- Information services sees the need for new but costly resources for the organization. How do you argue for purchase/inclusion of these new resources?
- The information services unit needs more information professionals to perform such activities as: database management, online searching, development of value added resources (guides, bibliographies, intranets, analysis of and evaluation of data and resources). How do you argue for additional but costly professional staff?
- Guidelines for assessing costs of services (Tu 21 April)
What specific elements constitute the startup and ongoing costs of a particular information service?
How do you place a dollar value on services involving human factors, use of information resources to which the organization subscribes or has some form of electronic access?
What are some strategies for presenting costing requests to management?
Situations:
- As information services manager you want to add a new resources deliverable to users' desktops and need to request funding or add to your annual budget request.
- As manager you want to request extraordinary funding to set up a major information system (a database mgmt system; an intranet with many resources (external and internal) available electronically; a knowledge management system)
- Evaluation and measurement techniques (Tu 28 April)
What are some of the commonly employed evaluation devices for assessing the value/performance of the information services unit?
Methods/devices for assessing the utility of a particular information resource?
What are some of the purposes served by ongoing evaluations of services, products and performance?
- Management Issues (Th 30 April)
Mission statements, service plans and marketing of services -- what role do they play in organizational viability and success?
What is the importance/role of organizational and individual accountability in service provision? What does accountability mean?
How does the organizational culture of an institution or user group affect success or failure of information services?
What steps lead to appropriate visibility of the information services unit/organization ?