Almost a week ago I wrote that the Tri-College Management Group had decided to dissolve a long-standing consortial committee, the Library Web Services Integration group, and to replace it with a top-heavy Technology Advisory Group.
Today, LWSI was reconvened to discussed the proposed model for technology management in the Trico. It became increasingly evident that the management decision, presented as final, was in fact a ‘first draft’ attempt to distill a model for technology management that has been percolating in the six months since a pivotal member of the Trico IT team resigned.
What emerged from LWSI was a proposal to create a standing working group from the pool of individual systems SuperUsers that would succeed LWSI to exist alongside the new Technology Advisory Group. The overarching philosophy is that TAG includes the kind of administrative staff who are able to make decisions about new technology projects, but there still needs to be a group composed largely of systems users who can make the day-to-day tweaks to our systems that are required for them to run smoothly and play together nicely. There is also a concern for including representation from people who are intimately knowledgable about the user experience of our patrons, and a SuperUsers working group will serve this need quite effectively.
I think that convening a SuperUsers working group to exist alongside TAG and to manage the day-to-day maintenance of our existing systems is a feasible solution to the problem we identified in TAG; namely, that it consists of people who are ultimately too separated from the systems they are managing to effectively maintain day-to-day operations, and that these day-to-day operations should not have to move through a top-heavy bureaucratic structure to get taken care of. While, at this time, I don’t qualify for inclusion in a SuperUsers working group, I hope to be considered as a candidate for any systems that aren’t currently served by a SuperUser.
