Oh, the glorious and all-telling Value Stream Map. Before we dive in, it’s best to frame the picture above with a quote from the man credited with starting it all – Taiichi Ohno:

“All we are doing is looking at the time line, from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing the time line by reducing the non-value adding wastes.”

Using the value stream map above, we can see a typical manufacturing process that begins with an order, followed by some downtime, some work being done, more downtime, and so on until the process ends with a finished product. What you’ll notice in the bottom right corner of the figure is a significant discrepancy between the entire cycle time (76.5 hours) and the actual amount of time spent creating the product, i.e. Value Added Time. A common goal for process improvement projects is to minimize the amount of downtime between value-adding steps. Clearly, a reduction in cycle time leads to increased throughput, and so on.

So how does this apply to information services?

I look at information and the transfer of information as a process, no different than a manufacturing line that produces cars, tires or lightbulbs. With that in mind, we can look at information services and the processes used to deliver the inputs of raw data and information as the steps required to turn those inputs into actionable insights.

The rationale behind Single Sign-On Solutions…

Consider the number of different web services and applications your company deploys. You have your ERP programs, cloud-based applications (e.g. Office365, Salesforce, Google Apps) along with the long list of published resources including databases, scholarly journals, news and more. The list really goes on and on and each resource has different username/password requirements. Headaches aside, it’s a highly iterative process that adds up over time.

Using authentication protocols like Shibboleth, OpenAthens, OpenID (the list goes on), users are able to authenticate directly into services with a single credential. This saves a huge amount of time and effort for an entire organization by removing the non-value added step of logging into every single resource every time you need to access it.

Librarians can work in tandem with their IT organizations to deliver SSO solutions to their organizations. Going a step further and meeting users on mobile devices with a native-mobile app, users can benefit from Sticky Authentication and get straight to the information that they need without any username/password hassle.

Want to learn more about how a native mobile app can help you deliver more value to your organization? Contact the Boopsie team to learn more.