Out of the Ashes
I was speaking with a former client yesterday who is coming back to the Outsell fold. This is a leading IM professional in a well-known global company whose brand anyone would recognize. We served them from 2001 until about 2015, when the powers that be decided to blow up their corporate library — not just the physical library but even the digital library/portal — and let go of or reassign the team members who managed it.
I couldn’t believe what we were seeing, but circa 2008–2015, corporate libraries were going the way of the dodo, sadly enough. Corporate execs were not enlightened. They thought IT could handle it all, and if that department couldn’t, then certainly Google could. So we saw library after library get catapulted into oblivion while Google became the “big library in the sky.” It was sad. Good people lost jobs, and valuable services went by the wayside. Technology companies led the way — Sun, Oracle, and so on — saying “what library? That’s so yesterday.”
Pharma companies, by and large, had the smarts to keep this function, which is largely associated with R&D and is important due to FDA approvals and drug pipeline management. However, so many more libraries, including many in biotech, just went away. At that point, we saw a lot of information services firms move their services toward end-user and workflow, disintermediating what libraries were left and trying to protect themselves from this core market going away.
I wondered when the trend might swing back, and I got a glimpse into that when this client called out of the clear blue sky a few weeks ago saying that their upper management, mostly new now, wished to put the function back in place.
It seems that their predecessors, who thought libraries were so yesterday, forgot that we live in an information and data revolution, and there is more of it now, not less. People can’t find what they need, so they are duplicate-spending, overpaying, and not keeping track of where essential external and internal information and research are.
Technical papers all over heck and back. Market research scattered. Trying to get answers to key questions long forgotten becoming impossible.
So, seven years after blowing up a decades-old library, the function is being brought back together, staff selected, and budget provisioned. Out of the ashes, they are rising. What a great story.
I wondered when big companies would wake up to the fact that they aren’t managing their data. That their information is scattered all over the place, and the people with the very skills to manage this mess have been let go. We manage our pencils and paperclips with over-zealous procurement departments, but information services? Invisible. Strangely enough.
So, for now, this one company has awakened. A client we served decades ago is coming back. They’ve been promised budget for a minimum of 10 years.
The client’s comment to me?
“My job is to make sure this decision never happens again.”
Amen to that.