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August 14, 2006
OODA
Observe
Orient
Decide
Act
John Boyd was a fighter pilot whose extraction of the OODA loop out of his Korean War experience set him off on years of pushing his ideas on a reluctant military establishment. His concept percolated out into the business world, and has been the subject of a number of books and articles.
For our purposes, let's just think of the OODA loop in the context of decisions about services to patrons:
Watch what patrons are doing, put it in context, decide how to respond, and do it.
"Be nimble and smart" doesn't capture the important point here. It's all about orientation -- accurately assessing the context of an observation, and a decision to be made.
Here's an example: when is the best time to have acquired a book that a patron wants to check out? Today. Yesterday, it was just taking up shelf space, and you expended resources that you might not have needed to give up. Tomorrow, and you're not serving the patron's best interests. Can't be done? Well, Baker & Taylor's closest distribution center to Darien Library is in Bridgewater, NJ, 93 miles away. We get most of our items from them the next day, if they're in stock there. If we were five miles away from the warhouse, I'll bet you $100 I could work out a deal to pick up our daily order at 5:00 pm, and have it in the hands of our patrons the same day they asked for a book. And I'll bet you in three years we will be getting some of our orders the same day, from some vendor.
But that's the trivial point. It's just physical and an accident of geography.
But what about services that patrons want that we could provide in real time? We haven't done much yet. Following other libraries, we've moved to IM reference, and on-line reservation for Children's programs, but truthfully, that's late and incomplete and trivial. Nothing like what Ann Arbor is doing.
But is anyone doing this? What if you observed patrons with a common interest -- say the Crimean War -- and thought that the right orientation for the library is to offer them an interest group page on the Library's web site, where they could access information from the library catalog, and on-line resources, hold discussions on-line, and place an on-line reservation for a conference room and some time with a reference librarian? Not late, not incomplete, not trivial. And I'll bet there are tools currently in use by university libraries can accomplish this.
I'll bet you can think of lots of things to do for your patrons that are even more significant, and even more important to the future of our libraries. Our failure to do them is simply lack of imagination.
Oops, no it's not. Phew! Because we don't know how to observe our individual patrons' actions and needs and orient ourselves to to the correct response. Jenny wants a coder. Well, I want the tools to get inside our patron's OODA loop so I can let my imagination soar in providing them services and resources they can't believe they can get from our library. If that's a programmer, great. If that's a vendor, wonderful. Whatever it takes, I want it. Right now. Not yesterday, not tomorrow.
Posted by Alan Kirk Gray at August 14, 2006 12:47 PM