Small Carrots, No Sticks: Engaging Campus Business Partners in the Design and Deployment of New Enterprise Services in a Decentralized Campus Environment

During a single academic year, Carnegie Mellon University Libraries' Digital Strategy team launched two major IT service offerings in support of university-wide strategic initiatives: A new Integrated Library System (ILS) and an Enterprise Research Information Management System. The former replaces the operational heart of the library; the latter positions the library at the center of the research enterprise at Carnegie Mellon, introducing Libraries to entirely new and demanding customers and partners. We outline the challenges of engaging campus business partners in a remarkably decentralized environment and present strategies and tactics used by the Library IT project and service managers to facilitate successful service launches. This includes a review of approaches to engagement and timeline management with campus customers and data providers, vendor management tactics, and evolving efforts to foster support for our services and associated projects.

Presented at the ACM SIGGUCS 2018 Conference in Orlando, Fl.