Eye on the Till

Last week I attended a one-day overview of the business management system Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL for short. As has happened at most Universities, the Library I work in was merged with the Information Technology department several years ago. The new strategy of this merged department includes an emphasis on service management. As part of this, we have all received training in the wise ways of ITIL.

While I am all for continuous improvement there are a number of problems with ITIL, that after reflecting on the training we received I can begin to define.

Customers
"We should refer to students as customers."

"We should treat them as customers, especially because that's what they have come to expect."

"If we don't treat them as customers, they will go somewhere else and you won't have a job anymore!"

The above are pretty much exact quotes from our trainer.

I've said this before; ideas and the language we use to describe them are powerful things. As the old adage goes, the difference between a Terrorist and a Freedom Fighter is one of semantics, yet one is reviled and the other celebrated. What particular ideas are we implicitly agreeing to when we consent to call our students customers? To label the people we work with a customers is to dehumanise them. They become reduced to a consumer, a means of profit, and a metric. When we talk this way we're implicitly placing the profitable before everything else because inevitably some people are more profitable than others. Especially in Higher Education, where the coveted international student provides at least twice the financial income to their university when compared to the domestic student.

CC0 image from https://unsplash.com/

But here's the thing, libraries don't exist to be profitable. As a Librarian I am in the business of giving away books, information, and my time and advice for free. We occupy the same sphere as Hospitals and Schools, hell, we're even a registered charity. Do you refer to patients in Accident and Emergency as customers? What about primary school children? Or people who make the odd charitable donation? If you do, then friend I feel sorry for you.

What really annoyed me about this particular mindset, was the the worst case scenario that our instructor could come up with involved students taking their business elsewhere. For me, that is not a particularly bad thing at all. Other Universities and Libraries are not the competition. We actually collaborate on lots of wonderful projects, and Higher Education institutions in general work really well together. There are services and resources at other institutions that I simply cannot provide, and vice versa. In reality the worst-case scenario isn't one where a student makes a business decision between homogenised services. The worst possible scenario is one where the student isn't challenged, isn't provided for, and doesn't grow or develop as a result. The worst thing that could happen is that they don't learn anything.

The big choices that we make in life aren't about where we take our business, they're about the kind of communities we choose to be a part of, and the faiths/politics/moralities we grow into.

Ownership
"It's not proprietary."

This is an outright lie from the trainer, verbatim. ITIL was jointly created by the business process company Capita, (who owns 51%) and the Cabinet office of the British Government (who owns 49%) under the name ALEXOS. Capita recorded an operating profit of 640 million GBP in 2015. The ITIL name is a (registered) Trade Mark of AXELOS Limited. The training I received was delivered by a company called Global Knowledge, under license. Every training slide had a © mark and a copyright statement on the bottom. None of the images in the training presentation were credited, by the way. Not even the still from an episode of the Simpsons, or the handful of image macros.

My employer (a publicly-funded charity) paid a private company to deliver training under license which was developed by the British Government. While 49% of ILIL belongs to the United Kingdom, it is very much proprietary.

Ingenuous
"It's just a framework, an idea. Think of it as advice or guidance. Really, it's written-down common sense."

It's deceitful to suggest that corporatist ideology is just a bit advice. Ideas are contagious, self-replicating viruses and bad ones particularly so. The continual service improvement definition of 'better, faster, cheaper,' is a three-word simplification that could be the motto of economic liberalism. Something I have a hard time placing within an educational context. That definition of improvement doesn't match up to my own, and I wonder how many Librarians would say the same. As a member of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals I have a duty to consider the public good in my professional life.

I feel that applying business improvement ideology to something that is so clearly not a business is discordant if not irresponsible, and at least warrants a closer examination. Business improvement focuses so much on processes and metrics and these are easy things to measure when you are trying to make a financial profit. However I do wonder how Libraries will be cast when examined through the same lens. It's not a framework disposed to work in favour, that's for sure.