I feel I should probably reply to this, since I was chair of the LA
Enterprise Board when the initial decision was made to set up a consultancy
department and I was also involved in the appointment of David Haynes to
run it. To get the bureaucratic stuff over first, this was all done in
complete accordance with the LA's rules and procedures: the Enterprise
Board had a detailed discussion based on a properly work-up business plan;
the plan, with amendments following our discussion, then went to LA Council
for a full, open and (for once) reasonably rigorous debate before receiving
either unanimous or overwhelming approval (I forget which, sorry).
David's appointment, as I'm sure you will appreciate, involves a number of
issues of commercial and personal confidentiality, but was made in what I
consider a proper and scrupulous manner and involved an outside assessor as
well as the LA's chief exec, the director of Ents and myself as chair.
Speaking personally, I though David's appointment was an excellent move for
the association and one which will bring the operation into profit more
quickly than one would normally expect when starting up a completely new
business area.
The business of an association's competing with members is superficially
attrative but does not, I think bear close examination. I can't think of
any professional association of any size that does not have its equivalent
of Enterprises, and precious few who are not substantially dependent on the
income these equivalents bring in. The two associations I know well, the
BMA and Cilip are in practice completely dependent on their commercial arms
and without them would be smaller, punier, poorer, more expensive and
arguably not worth belonging to. I don't have the current figures to hand,
but without Ents we would all be paying something like 50% more for our
subscription (assuming membership at the same level).
Almost everything Enterprises does involves some measure of competition
with members (or people who jolly well should be members if they took their
professionalism seriously): Facet and Update, compete against small
publishing houses owned and/or run by qualified librarians, Infomatch
competes in a cowded specialist area, LA courses and conferences compete
with all sorts of events run by LA members (included some I'm responsible
for, to declare an interest). It's inevitable, and is true to the extent
that it is sometimes difficult to find Councillors with the expertise to
contribute to the Ents Board who do not have conflicts of interest that
disqualify them. ( I had to drop out of a couple of things before
joining).
I cannot agree that the Cilip provenance tilts the playing field unfairly
in favour of the new consultancy service. Most people doing LIS
consultancy work (whole time such as the TFPL team or occasional such as
myself) have some provenance which they draw on (or hide) when pitching for
business and the independents have been pitching for years against, on the
one hand, universities and bit-on-the-side merchants, and on the other hand
against the glossy internationals such as, er, Arthur A. And doing so with
enough success to at least stay in business.
As a registered charity, the LA and now Cilip has to be completely open,
transparent, etc etc in relation to its accounts and in my experience bends
over backwards to observe the sp[irit of the Charity Commissioners' edicts
as well as the letter. In my time as chair this concern within Cilip
certainly extended to ensuring that we were not loss-leading on the back of
members' subs or exploiting our position in competitive situations (I
actually thought we should have done a bit more of this exploitation and
said so on several occasions, unavailingly.)
Painfully so sometimes. Individual departments' accounts include all
expenditure relating directly to their activities but do not include a
share of overhead, which is allocated centrally. There are good reasons
for doing this, none of which are in any way intended to obfuscate or
generally play fast and loose with Cilip's integrity or members' money. A
full cross-charging, overhead-allocating system would be a criminal waste
of Cilip's narrow resources:
In my experience of such things many years ago it produces useless
figures which have been subverted by management to fit their personal
advantage or the prevailing internal political climate (which is a waste
of precious creativity apart from anything else).
Ents is not an exclusively commercial concern, although it arguably
should be. In the real world it publishes stuff for professional and
organisational reasons which no commercial publisher would touch; it
organises conferences and meetings which will never cover costs; it
offers career advice and help to all-comers and generally supports and
contributes to the general work of the organisation and the profession.
This was, incidentally, the only good reason I could find for not
appointing David - I thought he would be so ubiquitously useful within
Cilipthat he'd never get himself free of Cilip commitments and do any
outside work!
Personally and for several reasons, I would like to see Cilip move a
little bit more into overhead allocation than they currently do but this is
an argument I was never near to winning. All I can say, is that while I
was chair of Ents Board I was eagle-eyed to an extent others found very
tiresome, in ensuring that real commercial activities were really
profitable regardless of accounting conventions. In particular I was a
thorough pain in the director's neck over the financial side of the
Consultancy proposal. I can assure you categorically that (a) the original
business plan was sound enough to support a nice little independent
business and would return a real surplus; and that (b) the appointment of
David Haynes made it possible to ditch the original and reasonably good
financial plan and replace it with a very much more glowing projection.
I think what I'm trying to say, in the nicest possible way, that your
real unfair competition comes from those of us with proper day jobs who
occasionally sacrifice a few days' leave to earn a bit of holiday money on
the side without worrying about any overheads whatsoever. Cilip
Consultancy is just competition, hopefully tough competition.
Tony McSean
BMA Librarian and formerly Chair of LA Enterprise Board
Leonard Will
<L.Will@WILLPOWER To: [log in to unmask]
INFO.CO.UK> cc:
Sent by: Subject: CILIP Consultancy Service
LIS-CILIP
<LIS-CILIP@JISCMA
IL.AC.UK>
04/09/02 18:25
Please respond to
LIS-CILIP
I was interested to learn that CILIP has recently set up a consultancy
service. The draft Corporate Plan says that this will "further the
knowledge of CILIP members and the wider library and information
community" and will not only set standards for excellence but also
generate a surplus from 2003 onwards.
I have no question with the quality of the service that will be
provided, and I was pleased to see David Haynes' excellent article in
the August issue of "Library + Information Update" which should help
potential clients to understand what consultancy is all about.
I wonder, though, whether it is appropriate for a professional body to
develop services in direct competition with many of its members. There
are many professional consultants already in this field; I have talked
to some others and they reasonably agree that the playing field is not
level if a new service is set up with the name and status of our leading
professional body behind it.
As the new service is intended to make a profit for the Institute, I
presume that it will be treated as a trading organisation similar to
Facet Publishing, with its own accounts, including full charging for
accommodation, overheads, advertising and services that it receives in
the headquarters building, and I assume that these accounts will be
available to members.
Perhaps it is intended that existing consultant members of the Institute
should be associated with the service in some way - this is a
possibility which it would be interesting to hear about, but I suspect
that the level of enthusiasm will depend on whether consultants will
lose out by having to pay commission or introduction fees or whether on
the other hand they will share in some of the profits of the enterprise,
if any.
Will some consultancy services be provided free or at a reduced rate to
CILIP members, in furtherance of the first objective in the initial
paragraph above?
Leonard Will
MCLIP
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