The last question for SLA candidates was: What should SLA let go of to be more effective and focused?
I think, at a basic level, we need to simply be willing to let go of things. We need to be willing to commit to what we can do, and stop doing those things that just don’t make sense any longer. If you’re like me, this isn’t a strong suit. We like to say yes much more than we like to say no. That’s part of the reason why I’m here speaking (and writing) to you now!
I don’t think I can accurately speak to what specifically we need to stop doing, without more detail around SLA operations. I believe we do need to have some kind of criteria to help us make the right decisions, to be able to identify and prioritize those things that we need to keep doing, and those things we can drop.
At Sun Microsystems, our library group developed a set of criteria that helped us to rank our projects, and to be able to re-evaluate our current projects against new projects that came along. It wasn’t entirely objective, but it at least helped us to be able to more objectively look at what we were doing and understand where we were getting the most benefit for our efforts.
In SLA’s case, we obviously need to fulfill our financial and ethical obligations. But we also need to develop or modify a tool like this to help us divorce ourselves – and I include myself in this – from our personal attachments, and to effectively and efficiently serve the membership.
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