Planning is important when implementing a new system. The planning phase should be connected with the development of the system and with the library’s vision. If done properly planning would prevent time and effort from being wasted, better education and awareness of what is going on and better manipulation of the whole system. Improvements that should have been applied in the planning period where realized from lessons learnt at the end.
1. Staff experienced a huge amount of pressure when starting to get used to the new application software. The setting up of new modules in the completely new system was a tough task. It would have been better to ask the supplier to provide more pre-configuration and not only advice and flexibility.
2. A huge amount of time and effort were spent on data conversion. More time needed to be spent planning on what data needed to be converted or created again. It would have been easier to recreate some data rather than converting it to the new system. The Adlib data was very complicated and required a lot of work to convert it to Aleph.
3. More training and education with real life examples before implementing the system would have helped the staff understand better the move from one system to another. Although staff and users saw the advantages of the new system they were also conscious about things that Aleph performed less well.
5. The fact that there was a lot of time available led to a relaxed manner when working on the project. A lot of time was taken for granted and this resulted in a load of accumulated work in the last few weeks. It would have been better if the staff worked hard as if there was no time frame. This would have prevented a lot of hassle at the end.
6. The library should have uploaded more notices and created awareness of the importance of attending workshops. More hands-on experience should have been given rather than only theoretical information.
Which path you would have followed if you where to choose from having a new system with all the difficulties it brings along (as you ate describing above), and leaving the "old" system until the newly purchased system is "fully-fletched", up and running, 100% ok...
ReplyDeleteWy would you choose one instead of the other?
Claudio
Personally, I would have kept the old system running on the front, and having the new one running in the backend for testing and training the staff on it until every member of the staff has mastered the use of the new system so as to be able to fully utilize it and teach the patrons how to make use of such a system as well.
ReplyDeleteSystems also differ, whether one would have ordered a tailor-made system or if having ordered a standard one.
Implementing a tailor-made system would be better as it would suit every need of the organization, though the disadvantage of which, would be difficulties in upgrading, and would take a longer time to create (from the supplier), and also more expensive at the end of the day. So one should see the priorities of the particular organization.
Mark unfortunately one could not have both systems running as these were not compatible. Having said that, both systems were running simultaneously for a brief time in 2010 but the library needed to focus more on the new system. One has to remember that the newly downloaded catalogue records were not compatible with Adlib (the old system) and therefore the old catalogue was getting phased out while the new one was being strengthened
DeleteThat is exactly what I was saying!
DeleteThe library still had the old system running, while the new one was running in the background and being tested etc!