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Reference and Information Services
3 (2-2)

Product management: a new skill for reference librarians?.
Author: Smith, Rebecca A.
Source: Reference & User Services Quarterly v. 39 no2 (Winter 1999) p. 121-7
ISSN: 0033-7072 Number: BLIB00004524

Copyright: The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.

The broad range of offerings and the intese competition characteristic of today's marketplace present interesting challenges to the creators and providers of goods and services. Hammer and Champy said of service sector commerce, "consumers expect and demand more, because they know they can get more."(FN1) The rapid advances in computing and telecommunications, coupled with the far-reaching changes in work patterns in our society, have created a demand for services not only more rich in content but also more flexible in delivery. Retail customers, for example, expect to get their goods quickly and at their convenience. Generally, convenience is defined as being able to place orders for goods at any hour, on any day, using the desktop or telephone, and having the products delivered by overnight express to almost any location. The success in this environment of firms such as Land's End, MacWarehouse, and Amazon.com has fostered a heightened level of expectation among consumers.

This expectation generates pressure on service-sector organizations (such as banks, information services, and libraries) to act with equal speed and flexibility. These organizations have reacted in many innovative ways, none more important than emphasizing customer support. An important aspect of customer support often involves product management. Product management could prove to be a new competency for academic reference librarians/information specialists in the future, especially if they plan to be central to a university's priorities.

THE CLIMATECHANGING TECHNOLOGY AND SERVICE DELIVERY OPTIONSThe rapid evolution of computing technology in financial institutions has revolutionized the nature of banking services. As recently as the late 1970s, the vast majority of customers had to go inside the main bank to check account balances, obtain cash, make deposits, and perform transfers from one account to another. In response to social and environmental trends, banks extended to their customers similar services at branch banks and drive-through facilities, but these innovations were fundamentally a limited extension of access to human-mediated service. Technology changed this in the 1980s. The automatic teller machine (ATM) offered menu-driven services, once exclusively provided by tellers, without the time restrictions of banking hours. Currently, banks offer such services as electronic fund transfers and bill paying over the Internet, so that customers can perform these duties at their home or office. The Gartner Group recently reported that financial institutions spent nearly $32 billion in 1998 on technology and communications, up 7 percent from the previous year.(FN2) Banks are now looking at technologies that support releasing data over wireless pocket-sized communications tools.(FN3) This immediate access to bank accounts has empowered customers, who now perceive opportunities in managing their resources more efficiently and without much cost.

The Internet has created parallels in the delivery of services for library and bank customers. In the library environment, the rapid evolution of electronic tools has made it possible for libraries to offer a full range of services. In the late 1960s and 1970s, corporate and academic librarians searched commercial databases, such as Lockheed's DIALOG and Mead Data Central's LEXIS, to retrieve citations or abstracts of documents. The citations or abstracts were printed online at the librarian's computer or sent to the user through the mail. Document delivery modes evolved so that in the mid-1980s the content could be transmitted at higher data speeds, captured, downloaded, and then mailed electronically to the user's desktop. In the late 1980s, libraries began offering CD-ROMs so that users could come to the library and perform searches themselves, keeping online searching costs down. Technology in the early 1990s pushed the envelope with the advent of Mosiac and the World Wide Web. The proliferation of Internet portals, commonly known as search engines, has challenged librarians to keep up to date in order to point the remote user to the appropriate tools. The now-chaotic Web is becoming more ubiquitous with content aggregators, such as Primark and OCLC, as well as bits of free data on organizational and personal home pages. Libraries can offer a potentially unlimited number of databases to the end-user, and the user might not ever need to come to the library.

THE CLIENTSUSER NEEDS FOR INFORMATIONWith users' abilities to do more from their home base, the Internet now is perceived as a more convenient substitute for materials found in the library. The Wall Street Journal Interactive (WSJIA), for example, is free if an individual subscribes to the print newspaper. This database allows the user to search for articles, obtain stock quotes, or examine detailed job advertisements. In the academic world, which now mirrors the corporate sector, business professors and students subscribe to products such as WSJIA, even if the library has a subscription. Because of the perception that the Internet is free or inexpensive, these same users, as reported widely throughout the literature, first look for information using the Web, even if the sites are questionable in content and it takes them hours to perform the research. A recent survey by Geffert and Christensen suggests that in fact that incoming students think the material on the Internet is just as reliable as books and articles in the library.(FN4).

In contrast to undergraduates, experienced researchers expect information to be both accurate and organized for them in order to increase their productivity. Those in the economics or business disciplines, for example, prefer their data to be in a time series. Professors and Ph.D. students, in particular, want a historical archive of articles or working papers when possible. The researcher might start with the Internet because it is readily available. The proliferation of books, serials, and datafiles produces reams of information and users are often unsure where to begin. As librarian Michael Lavin commented about business research, "All researchers must confront an inescapable fact: Information is a boundless resource and no one can acquire all possible information on a given topic. The sheer mass of available data makes research difficult and most material unearthed in a search will be irrelevant to the user's immediate needs."(FN5) Moreover, academic researchers have discovered that they have many choices not only regarding delivery mode but also the content of the information tools. Information is a highly segmented commodity. Adrian Slywotzky aptly pointed out in his book, Value Creation, that customers are brand switching to high-level substitutes.(FN6) Users can buy slices of data from proprietary databases that often include numeric data that can be arranged in many different formats. Vendors frequently market and sell these products directly to the users, such as the Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) data retrieval system, which provides interfaces to Institutional Brokers' Estimates (I/B/E/S), and Standard & Poor's COMPUSTAT databases.

Vendors directly selling to the users sometimes appall academic librarians, who see their role as mediators of information being bypassed. However, librarians need to recognize that this new environment has created a plethora of choices and capabilities for end-users. If academic librarians hope to compete successfully in the information marketplace, they will have to restructure reference service. Enyart and Smith already have suggested that reference staff, in maintaining their status as a major delivery vehicle, need to consider themselves a marketing force.(FN7) The front-line staff can scan the environs to find out what services and products university clientele have identified as their information priorities. With marketing as a primary function, one of the new services to be horizontally integrated is managing product lines for the library. Reference librarians are evolving into more than just subject specialists who are familiar with print materials; they are the "product managers" of all kinds of resources. They are the experts to whom users can turn when they need specialized information. However, if users within the institution cannot obtain the information in a timely manner, they will bypass the library and not see it as a necessary service or resource. An administrator expressed it well: "If I am a student who needs to hop on a database that I can get in my own department but can't get in the library, then in my own mind the library will not be central to my needs."(FN8).

THE SOLUTION OF BUSINESSTHE EVOLUTION OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENTThe rapid advances in computing and telecommunications have created a demand for services not only more rich in content but also more flexible in delivery. An important aspect of customer support often involves product management, loosely defined as becoming knowledgeable about a product and then implementing its most effective use within an organization. Product managers (PMs) in marketing organizations are those who are "responsible for a product, product line, or several distinct products in a group."(FN9) They continually evaluate the performance of their products, devise appropriate policies, and consider the potential market. Procter & Gamble first employed product managers in 1927. One of their new soaps, Camay, was not selling well in the marketplace. One of the employees was assigned to focus on the development and promotion of Camay. This initiative was successful, paving the way for additional product managers.(FN10) Many companies that manufacture consumer and information products, as well as those who distribute them in the retail sector, employ product managers or buyers (as they are known in the retailing industry).

Marketing departments, whether they are in manufacturing companies or financial institutions, are organized as product management teams. Each team consists of program, product, and resource managers. Program managers create, implement, and monitor strategies and plans, and make changes when necessary. Product managers are generally matrixed along with functional managers who are responsible for market research, advertising, and sales. Together, functional and product managers share accountability for the following activities: planning for the long term; devising the annual marketing plan; developing advertising plans with agencies; and stimulating and sustaining support of the sales force. Product managers continually evaluate the performance of their products, devise appropriate use procedures and consider other potential markets. They talk with customers and obtain feedback from them about their priorities. PMs also introduce new products in order to replace those that are entering the decline phase of their life cycles. These managers ensure that the mix of the available products is right, in terms of similar kinds of products and their targets. They also work with other product managers to coordinate product lines and ensure that the products offered align with the company's overall marketing strategy.

Product management is not a new concept to librarianship. In their 1984 landmark study concerning the future education of librarians, Griffiths et al. set forth job descriptions and competencies that would be needed for information professionals in the twenty-first century. They asserted that one necessary competency would be product management.(FN11) However, they saw product management more as a skill set in the area of corporate information centers. The corporate information specialist with these skills would supervise the loading of tapes or created in-house databases to fit the clientele's information needs. This person would also track usage to ensure that it had all of the functionality the database promised to deliver. For academic reference librarians, this study suggested that competencies should include knowledge of available vendor-supplied systems, services, and products to support reference; knowledge of the contracting process, both in general and within the organization; knowledge of methods to evaluate systems, services, and products; and knowledge of public relations techniques. If taken broadly, these criteria are similar to what a product manager would do within an academic library: being proactive in seeking and championing all kinds of products.

The product management reported at Procter & Gamblearose when a particular product line needed extra care and the attention of an expert. In the 1990s many academic libraries, such as Texas A&M University (TAMU), branched out to meet the increasing needs of their constituents and in the process restructured services. TAMU's West Campus Library is a concrete example of how restructuring impacted their services and resulted in product management.

AN ACADEMIC LIBRARY REACTIONRESTRUCTURING OF REFERENCE SERVICES AT TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITYFollowing the trend of many academic libraries in the 1970s, Texas A&M University centralized public services. Reference librarians attempted to answer any user question, often out of their field of expertise or subject background. Under this service model, some faculty and students were frustrated because they were not able to find specific data needed for research or, even worse, felt their research priorities were misunderstood. Users had good reason for this concern: generalist librarians did not have the academic or subject background to provide help for the in-depth service required.

Texas A&M University's campus experienced enormous growth, so that it needed a branch library to serve ten thousand additional users. West Campus Library (WCL), a special library offering subject expertise to business and agriculture users, signaled a fundamental shift in the delivery of library services. The library started with fourteen databases managed by one person who also did training and documentation. Within eighteen months, the WCL LAN was connected to the LAN in the main library, and the rapid expansion in the number of databases demonstrated that the control span was too difficult for one person to handle.

In order to fulfill the demand for services, all of the reference librarians were asked to share the responsibility for the WCL databases. Product management then became one of their core duties. Additionally, WCL adopted the tiered-service model similar to other models created by Babson College and Baker Library at Harvard University.(FN12) The WCL reference librarians became liaisons to twelve departments in the colleges of business and agriculture. Collection development, previously the province of bibliographers at the main library, was gradually reassigned to WCL liaisons. Over a four-year period, the WCL reference department moved from a relative traditional model of service to one in which the broader concept of product management redefined their responsibilities.

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT WITHIN AN ACADEMIC LIBRARY CONTEXTThe library product management process contains five facets: discovery (conferences, product flyers, Web pages); evaluation (vendor contact, product comparison); initial negotiation (with concert with a functional manager); implementation (systems group involvement, help sheet development, staff training); and troubleshooting (which also gives customer feedback) (figure 1).

Here is an example of how the product management process might work in the selection and acquisition of a database for the library. In the discovery phase, the PM finds out about certain products during a conference, receives a flyer, views a product on the Web, or perhaps hears about certain databases from listservs such as SLABF-L or BUSLIB-L. With the approval of the resource manager, who is often the head of collection development or the library director, the PM shepherds the evaluation of the database by contacting the vendor, arranging for demonstrations and trial installation. The PM then tests the database, often consulting with selected library faculty and users. The PM considers pricing, indexing, licensing, platform, technologies of the clientele, sources within the database, and comparable products. If there is support to obtain a subscription to the database, the PM goes back to the resource manager to seek available monies. If the budget allows, and depending whether the product manager is very knowledgeable and confident about dealing with vendors, the PM could initiate the negotiation process. However, it is more common for the product manager to hand negotiations off to a functional manager, in this case, the electronic coordinator for database licensing. The coordinator shores up the final details with the vendor.

Once the library administration and university attorneys have finalized the contract, the implementation mode consists of working with the library systems group for installation. If the documentation that accompanies the product is nonexistent or inadequate, it is up to the product manager to develop help sheets and other user aids. The need for additional documentation is particularly acute for numeric databases where the use can involve many specific steps. The product manager then gives the help sheet to the reference team, which reviews it for clarity and content. If the database is heavily serial-oriented, a list of its indexed publications is put into a notebook accessible in the reference area.

After databases have been made accessible on the library's system, the product managers then work with a quality control person. This staff member checks all of the databases that are on the LAN on a weekly basis and reports any problems to the library systems staff and any databases that are not functioning properly to the PMs. When there is a problem that cannot be fixed by local systems staff, the PM performs the troubleshooting for problems related to such issues as licensing, timeliness, or basic functionality of the product. In performing these tasks, a product manager might need to interact with a wide number of parties, ranging from the library's own acquisitions staff to vendors.

Lastly, the product manager promotes the products by giving or arranging for training on the new databases, as well as sending e-mails to the business and agriculture library representatives. Comments or questions about the new databases are fed back to the vendors if improvements are repeatedly suggested.

THE PAYOFFTHE CHALLENGES AND BENEFITS OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENTThe process of product management brings new challenges. There is considerable followup, not to mention overlap on some subject specialties. For example, a specific Web site purchased for one area can apply to another. In that case, the nonproduct manager, liaison, or reference librarian, who might not be as familiar with a certain product, inadvertently could mislead the user about the potential of the content. The product manager or liaison might not find out about this before the user has left the building.

As mentioned earlier, liaisons would manage print products as well as databases. As a result, the product management of many platforms will become more intertwined as each liaison obtains customer feedback from the various departments. But another challenge is that product managers will not always agree with each other on which products to retain or promote, especially if the product manager has certain biases about particular products. One product manager might like some of the products of a certain vendor but believe the repackaging brings too much overlap and repetition. If another product manager likes that vendor and wants to buy many products, but does not understand about the business practices of the company, that product manager could be spending more out of the budget than intended. The supervisor has to be certain that there are enough resources available for each product manager and work out the conflicts in philosophies of resource allocation. Product management, particularly with knowledge work, requires a great deal of team effort, although it might be more like what Drucker has described as "jazz-combo" in nature.(FN13) All of this leads to strategic planning for the business unit and a process to determine how it fits within the goals of the library.

The benefits of product management outweigh the challenges, especially in attempting to keep up with many of the products on the market. It is easier to spread knowledge around the team, where each specialist is an expert on several databases or subjects and can cross-train the others on the team. Training, an essential part of product management, is particularly important in a tiered-service environment. The front-line staff is expected to know the basics of many databases because the users are anticipating immediate service when they call or walk in the room. Front-line staff members, who provide general customer support, can get the user started; a product manager can help with specific strategies. Time savings and accuracy, coupled with making the user feel welcome to ask questions, are attributes of good service. Experiencing this, there is a good probability the user may return for more suggestions for sources to consult when other projects arise.

CONCLUSIONBanks have already discovered that technology is a siren song for the consumer. However, banks recognize they need to offer some amount of human contact for questions about services, such as about mortgage application procedures or the use of PC banking services. If the customers cannot receive the services they desire, they can and will switch banks. Similarly, as Enyart and Smith have pointed out, "libraries no longer have a monopoly on the provision and distribution of information. As we face competition for information stewardship, it is the quality of service we provide that will determine our fate."(FN14).

Product management has been suggested as one of the many new competencies for academic librarians, allowing them to compete in the marketplace. This skill will be essential, given that users can already go around the library for some of their information needs, simply by using existing technologies. However, if users continue to perceive academic librarians as knowledgeable and service-oriented, the library will remain central to a university's mission and goals. To this end, Texas A&M University successfully has integrated product management into its West Campus Library, with the main library liaisons to soon follow its lead. However, further study will be needed to measure its full impact on users, since the process has been implemented only in the last couple of years.

While product management appears to be tedious and laborious at times, the process is useful because it allows the librarian or product manager to become very familiar with both the content and some of the technical aspects of the databases. A recent survey by the Phase 5 Consulting group reported that corporate librarians spend about 16 percent of their time on product management/development.(FN15) This figure is comparable to the time spent by WCL librarians on product management. Thus, expertise is developed for when problems arise or if the user has specific information needs. Conscientious product management, as another competency, can increase our knowledge and experience by raising our effectiveness at the reference desk, developing better library instruction programs, and promoting more relevant strategic planning for the future.

Added material.
Rebecca A. Smith, Guest Columnist.

Rebecca A. Smith is Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University, College Station; rebecca-smith@tamu.edu. The author would like to thank Charles Gilreath and Joseph Zumalt of Texas A&M University and Sharon Sandall for their inspiration and able assistance. A special acknowledgement belongs to retired director Jane Dodd, who introduced and practiced product management at West Campus Library.
Figure 1 Product Management Process.

FOOTNOTES1. Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution (New York: Harper-Business, 1994).

2. Frank Cerne, "Customer Focus Fuels Banks' Technology Spending Plans," Bank Technology News (Feb. 1, 1999): 1.

3. Lori Pizzani, "Banks Ponder the Power of New Internet Gadgets," Bank Technology News (Feb. 1, 1999): 1.

4. Bryan Geffert and Beth Christensen, "Things They Carry: Attitudes toward, Opinions about, and Knowledge of Libraries and Research among Incoming College Students," Reference & User Services Quarterly 37 (Spring 1998): 279-89.

5. Michael R. Lavin, Business Information: How to Find It, How to Use It (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1987): 4.

6. Adrian Slywotzsky, Value Creation: How to Think Several Moves Ahead of the Competition (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996).

7. Michael G. Enyart and Rebecca A Smith, "Reference Services: More than Information Chauffeuring," Special Libraries 87 (Summer 1996): 156-62.

8. Deborah J. Grimes, Academic Library Centrality: User Success through Service, Access, and Tradition (Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association, 1998): 81.

9. Philip Kotler, Marketing Management, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980): 584-89.

10. Ibid., 585.

11. Jose-Marie Griffiths, Paula Meise Strain, and Ellen A. Sweet, New Directions in Library and Information Science Education, Final Report. Volume 2.7: Information Center/Clearinghouse Professional Competencies. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Center for Libraries and Education Improvement, 1984 (ED 1.310/2:265860, 1984).

12. L. Allison Ounanian, "The Informerger: A Reference Service Delivery Model," Business Information Review 13 (June 1996): 119-28; Allison Ounanian and Karol Bartlett, "Upstaris, Downstaris: Public Service Initiatives at Baker Library," Business Information Review 14 (June 1997): 89-95.

13. Peter F. Drucker, Managing in a Time of Great Change (New York: Truman Talley Books, 1995): 98.

14. Enyart and Smith, "Reference Services: More than Information Chauffeuring," 160.

15. Doug Church. "Breaking Free of the Reference Shackles," Information Outlook 3 (March 1999): 18-23.

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