Lean Knowledge Management at Vantaa City Library

Abstract

Becoming “Lean” means eliminating waste with the goal of creating value. Lean thinking has long been a successful management philosophy in business world but it has spread also to the public sector. However there are only few public libraries that call themselves lean organizations. Vantaa city library is one of them.

The goal of Lean is always to gain better customer satisfaction, improve quality and minimize flow but there can be no Lean without a clear strategy. The strategy of Vantaa City Library is the advancement of multi- literacy skills. We call this our “end product”. The continuous improvement of the processes is a foundation for a new library where all the activities are examined from the waste elimination and customer oriented perspective. One of the most successful innovations of Vantaa City Library developed together with one Finnish ICT-company is a mobile application called “Pocket Library”. Via this mobile app customer can for example borrow a library loan from a friend without going to the library. The data received from the pocket library is being used to improve services. Other Lean activities are floating collection, centralized acquisition and open libraries just to mention a few. The most promising activities at Vantaa City Library have been inclusion, automatization and unloading back processes. Digitalization means both renewing activities and improving online services. When the routine work is automatized we can put our resources to more meaningful work and help the people to become literate citizens of the modern society.