I’m still getting used to corporate lingo and ways of doing things. Frankly I often try to suppress the instinct to roll my eyes with a lot of it because there is quite a bit of nonsense in it. Or else corporate types run around looking earnest and thinking they’re inventive by using buzzwords that mean exactly the same thing as something that’s been around for years. (Think ‘taxonomy’ vs. ‘cataloging.’ Yeah I know, technically they aren’t equivalent but they are kissing cousins and principles they use are much the same. It’s like cataloging for dummies.)

Today I was reading a post published in the Forrester Information and Knowledge Management Blog that talks about BI. Now as a longtime librarian, my immediate reaction was, huh?! BI? Oh my, are they talking about library BI (bibliographic instruction)? Nope. BI = business intelligence. Ok, I say to myself, just go with it. Actually the post is well worth reading, lingo aside. The author mentions the fact that the most commonly used BI tool is Microsoft Excel. I found that interesting. I use Excel quite a lot. So I’m doing BI too, just not the kind I thought he was talking about at first He also mentions that Google has added pivot table functionality to its Google Spreadsheets tool. To me that’s a big deal because I find pivot tables one of the most useful if little understood or used parts of Excel. I’ll have to go try it out. I know that those in “the enterprise” quite often turn up their noses at what Google is doing in terms of appealing to “enterprise users” with its web-based tools. But I think Google is really onto something here. Anything that breaks the stranglehold of Microsoft on such office tools is a good thing, in my opinion.

I’ve been using Excel quite a bit lately to track issues and problems reported to me or discovered by me or my team relating to the systems and services I manage in my library. This is something new for me even though the work itself isn’t. I’ve been told that “we need more metrics, metrics, metrics” so by gum, I’m going to provide metrics up the whazzoo. A friend and colleague in my library had already started using Excel in this way last year for a similar purpose. Even though it’s all a bit crude, you know what? It works. So I decided to copy what she did and modify it for my needs. It takes some getting used to and sometimes I wonder if the time spent on keeping it up to date is worth it. (E.g. should I track how much time I spend just on keeping it current?!) I started it with high hopes and kept it going for a few days, then came a huge influx of severe problems from all sides, I got overwhelmed just trying to address them, and neglected the issue log. In the last week or so I finally was able to get caught up.

One of the lessons I’m learning about doing this is that it’s only as good a tool as the amount of time you invest in it. I also am learning that although it might seem crude and surely there are more elegant solutions out there somewhere, it works for me and makes use of an existing tool. There’s more. As the evidence gets built up in the issue log, I am getting excited about the possibilities it provides for providing concrete facts and figures about what me and my team are doing, day in and day out. This becomes a record that helps demonstrate our value to our organization in new ways. I have very little staff or other resources at my disposal. I know we are doing a great job and that we can always improve. But our efforts aren’t recognized or valued a whole lot. Looking at trends and patterns in the issue log will help me combat the myopia.