 Hello, I am Dan Noonan, the Digital Preservation Librarian at the Ohio State University Libraries. Sue Beck and I will be discussing the journey we have taken at Ohio State over the past year and a half to document and understand our workflows that impact digital preservation and access to our digital materials. A year ago, we regaled you with our mouthful of acronyms and techniques, SIPOC, RACI, Rainwriting and Visualization, that we were using to shed light on our existing workflows. Today we will be discussing our initial recommendations that have surfaced from our workflow examination efforts. Sue, a Senior Systems Consultant and I are members of the University Libraries Information Technology Team and report to the Associate Dean for Distinctive Collections and Digital Projects. Sue and I are coming to you today from Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio, which occupies the ancestral and contemporary lands of the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Fioria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe and Cherokee peoples. The University resides on lands seeded in the 1795 Treaty of Grenville and the forced removal of tribal nations through the Indian Removal Act of 1830. We want to honor the resiliency of these tribal nations and recognize the historical context that has and continues to affect the indigenous peoples of this land. Additional information about our work can be found at our project Wikis located at go.osu.edu-dpa-workflow-analysis and go.osu.edu-dpa-digital-content-policy. In early 2020, the University Libraries formed the Digital Preservation Access Workgroup, or the DPNA, to guide the Libraries' policies, strategies and tactics for managing, preserving and providing access to its digital collections. Its initial charge was to identify and analyze our existing workflows that impact these processes. We engaged in utilizing three techniques to conduct the analysis and visualization, which came to us from the realm of process improvement, with roots in total quality management that continue to be used in lean and six sigma programs. This sidewalk exercise provides a very high-level view of our workflow or process, with a minimum of four and a maximum of seven process steps. These steps are aggregated up to a level of abstraction that still allows us to provide the unit with insight into their workflows. Building upon this sidewalk, we conducted the RACI exercise, which allowed us to identify for each process step the roles and their accompanying responsibilities. The RACI was an important bridge to the brainwriting process. It helped us identify who should be in the proverbial room for the brainwriting exercise. The brainwriting allowed us to dive deeper beyond those four to seven process steps and examine our workflows with a finer granularity, which ultimately allowed us to construct visualized process maps. While we had to adapt these traditionally face-to-face activities to being conducted and completed in a virtual environment, we successfully completed two dozen documented workflows, with a handful still in progress. We are currently analyzing how these workflows interconnect, or should, to have a more comprehensive knowledge of our workflows and processes. By highlighting the gaps and other potential barriers and opportunities in these process maps, we have identified areas that we need to focus on for process improvements. These process improvements and other initial recommendations have been documented in a report to our sponsors, and are the subject of the rest of this presentation. A more detailed discussion regarding SIPOC, RACI, brainwriting, and our visualization efforts can be found on our project Wiki. As with any project, there are challenges and benefits that we can identify as we progress, and while not complete, we have formulated our initial key discoveries. We have been told by many participants that these exercises have created the opportunity to examine, contemplate, and interrogate the processes and workflows for the first time. Further, it has encouraged systems thinking amongst our university library's colleagues, breaking them out of, or at least putting windows into, their silos. By augmenting the SIPOC process with the RACI, we have for the first time been able to document accountability, or lack thereof, for our processes and steps therein. As Sue mentioned, the DP&A has assembled an initial set of recommendations that contextualize the project, its activities, and initial key findings. The report identifies five key gaps, the implications of those gaps, provides recommendations to millerate those gaps, and concludes with categorizing the recommendations as quick wins or more long-term activities. The gaps concern how we process our digital materials, prioritize those activities, manage those processes, a resource to conduct the processes, and transparently document those processes. With the workflow analysis near completion, there are several key conceptual processing gaps that have surfaced. There is a lack of organizational prioritization process and governance, and process and project management, of which we will discuss in upcoming slides. Currently, all of our born digital processing is conducted in an ad hoc manner, due to lack of developed, articulated workflow and resource allocation. Therefore, university libraries need to develop and or implement standards and guidelines for good enough born digital accessioning and processing workflows. Further, it should commit to a more equitable resource allocation and prioritization for the identification and processing of born digital and at-risk audiovisual materials in our collections. While we have been diligently and iteratively standardizing our digitization processing workflow, they are not yet fully realized. Our capacity to digitize still outstrips our capacity to ingest content into the digital collections platform for preservation and access. The recommendations for improvement are inextricably linked to the completion of prioritization and governance workgroups recommendations, as well as preservation and digitization workflow design and the identification of bottlenecks that need to be re-engineered and optimized. With the loss of our temporarily audiovisual media specialist, our AV preservation and access program has been put on indefinite hold. We need to clear up the backlog of already digitized AV content that languishes in temporary storage space. This too is inextricably linked to the completion of prioritization and governance workgroups recommendations and the workflow re-engineering. In lieu of hiring a full-time permitted media specialist, we should establish a new workflow to optimize the preservation of and access to at-risk AV materials. In November of 2020, university libraries placed a moratorium on ingesting copyrighted works into the digital collections platform unless Ohio State has documented permission from the copyright holder or Ohio State is the copyright holder. Currently, the libraries do not have a risk assessment process in place for digitization and sharing of copyrighted material. This is further exacerbated by the lack of a copyright librarian at this time to implement and lead a process. However, copyright should not be an impediment to preservation. Therefore, university libraries should establish a process for risk assessment of digitized and born digital materials that allow us to ingest them into an appropriate preservation environment and allow us to share them to the extent we are allowed. We have been actively working on the gaps surrounding prioritization and governance since November of 2020 through the auspices of the digital content policy and governance subgroup. We approached this task from a change management frame of mind. First, we had to decide what the problem was we were trying to solve to which we developed the following statement. Quote, the Ohio State university libraries currently lacks a holistic approach to the governance and management of the activities to process born digital content and to digitize existing collection content that would facilitate our commitment to sustainable access, long-term stewardship, and preservation of this content for the benefit of our current and future users. From there, we needed to define the current state and vision of future state and then define the change we intended to affect along with the benefits it will bring. Those were the easy parts. We had that pretty well articulated and wrapped up in early 2021. We've spent the rest of the time thus far working on the process where we have ultimately defined what a project means to university libraries and have identified our common prioritization factors. We still have work in this area before we move on to determining how we will measure progress. The discussion regarding prioritization was particularly challenging as we can say we prioritize our work on a regular basis, but we have a hard time articulating the why and the how. Further, as we search for models and guidance on how to make prioritized decisions, we found there's a lot of advice and models for individuals, but a dearth for the organization, especially when having to establish cross-departmental priorities. We wanted to utilize a rubric that contextually understands the system capacity and allows us to match our needs to that capacity in an equitable manner. One of our team members eventually came across a tool that is being used at Case Western Reserve University for prioritizing digitization projects. We adapted it to our list of prioritization factors while adjusting the scoring and the waiting factors. It incorporates 18 factors within four categories of alignment, opportunity, readiness, and dependencies. The first three categories include positive scoring while dependencies are scored negatively. Finally, there are two initial show stopper factors. Has the collection been a session? And does this collection meet copyright risk assessment exemptions? By late October, we had conducted two tabletop tests of the rubric, which has led to its refinements. We are now in the process of determining how to implement, govern, engage its usage, and effectiveness. University Libraries lacks a cohesive approach to the end-to-end process and project management throughout the organization. This leads to annual reinforces our silos versus systematic methodology in conducting our work. You have many capable people within University Libraries who understand their roles and duties, but may not be fully aware of how their actions impact the efforts of others within your organization. Hence, the goal is to develop permanent solutions to address our processing gaps while acknowledging some gaps may be initially treated with a Band-Aid. In improving our process management, we will need to fill gaps via resource allocation and process re-engineering and optimization, but more likely through latter in combination with resource reallocation. To achieve this latter goal and based upon the workflow analysis, we need to re-engineer processes, especially the bottlenecks, optimizing the whole system, not just individual silos. We will identify a targeted demonstration project to analyze all of the workflows and make very specific recommendations related to process optimization. Within this framework, backlog, new projects, and day-to-day work must all be considered as part of the process and workflow. Further, we must provide appropriate University Library personnel training in effective process and project management techniques. This would include an examination of systems versus silos thinking. And finally, we need to develop, implement, and socialize our standardized, best, and good enough practices for process and project management. Some of the aforementioned gaps can be addressed by policy, process, and procedural improvements. However, there are others that can only be addressed through the appropriate resource allocations. While University Libraries is under-resourced in most areas compared to our peer institutions, there is a further imbalance of resources expended on physical objects as opposed to digital objects. Considering the current fiscal climate, creating and filling new positions as well as backfilling lost positions are less likely implementable recommendations at this moment. That is not to say they are any less important to the overall health of the organization. Process re-engineering to compensate for the lack of these resources is really just a Band-Aid solution. Therefore, we need to develop alternative pathways to success. University Libraries has a backlog of digitized and born digital content that is not appropriately described and processed in an acceptable preservation environment and or accessible to our users. Nor do we have the current human resource capacity to remediate this situation. This is further exacerbated by a lack of capacity for copyright risk assessment and archival processing necessary to facilitate the digitization in ingest processes. To expand our capacity, adequately handle our backlog, new projects, and our day-to-day work as well as begin to re-engineer our processes for efficiency, effectiveness, and equity. We need to go beyond just the process and consider the human resource implications for potential reallocation and career growth. University Libraries has deficits and expertise capacity across under-resourced areas for archival processing, processing born digital and audiovisual content, copyright risk assessment, metadata creation and remediation, and process and project management. It needs to develop internal expertise and skills related to these activities, which can be accomplished in conjunction with process re-engineering, position reimagining and reallocation, and targeted training and mentoring. University Libraries has documentation that articulates standard operating procedures, standards and guidelines, and best and good enough practices in regards to digitization, digital preservation, and providing access to our digital assets. However, it lacks a commonly understood and accepted central repository or portal for making these transparently available throughout the organization. To address this, and in conjunction with University Libraries' Intranet project, a place should be identified and or established for the deposit of this documentation. Additionally, in conjunction with process re-engineering and optimization, we need to develop a dashboard tool for the management of our digital assets. As we move forward with this project, we'll be looking to tackle the quick wins we identify in our initial recommendations report. This includes finalizing the prioritization rubric and its associated governance. Similar to documenting workflows, we also need to inventory and document the work we are doing. In conjunction with ongoing work to create the University Libraries' Intranet, we need to establish a documentation repository, or at least a portal to point to existing and future documentation that impacts our digital preservation and access processes, practices, and standards. And we look to conduct a kaizen event or events and build upon the outcomes for implementing long-term incremental improvements. You may ask with more than two dozen workflows, where do we start with process re-engineering? We utilize the theory of constraints, which considers the most important limiting factor, the constraint, that stands in the way of achieving our goal, and then systematically improving that constraint until it's no longer the limiting factor. The crucial factor here is the systematic approach, since localized optimization will only exacerbate these constraints. Based on the extensive visualization efforts conducted throughout the entire organization, we identified three areas that are fundamental strategic constraints in our system, copyright services, metadata initiatives, preservation and digitization. These constraints arise from various reasons, and although the process maps identify various gaps that contribute to the process flows coming to a halt at these units, we have to dig deeper in order to identify the root causes as well as possible solutions, and eventually create metrics to measure how effective and sustainable the proposed solutions will be. We are embracing the use of another business process management tool, that of kaizen, a Japanese term meaning change for the better, or commonly referred to as continuous improvement. We are planning to hold a kaizen event in order to bring the people closest to the process together and facilitate the discovery of a solution that works for them. Kaizen events are short term, usually a week long, but intense brainstorming and implementation sessions intended to improve an existing process. This kaizen event will bring the operators, managers and owners of these processes together in one place, in order to review the current state maps of our existing processes, then improve on the existing processes to identify future and desired state, document the proposed changes and identify how we plan to implement and then measure their success. Additionally, it provides the individuals at the heart of the process the opportunity to solicit buy-in from all related parties in order to sustain the proposed improvements. We will be utilizing an A3 tool to guide us through our week long kaizen event. Each day we will focus on certain areas and by the end of the week we will have a somewhat completed A3. It's important to note that the A3 must be maintained as a living document in order to track and measure the success of the implemented solutions and their sustainability until it's certain the improvements are part of the organization's transparent standard operating procedures. It is our sincere hope to implement process re-engineering recommendations that will flow from the kaizen event or events. We recognize the expertise in skill acquisition development cannot be achieved overnight, nor should they if they are to achieve true positive change. While an immediate impact point of view we can identify, establish and populate a documentation repo that exists with existing documentation over the long haul there will be further articulation, development and interactive refinement of our standardized best and good enough practices for university libraries, digital acquisition, digitization, processing, access and preservation activities. And as we quantify our work, tasks, collections, standards and practices we will need to iteratively develop and implement a dashboard toolkit to effectively view and manage our work in a transparent manner. Finally, as always, we will track and assess our success and document the heck out of the process sharing not only internally within the university libraries but with you, our colleagues. Thank you.