Changing customer needs, additional branches and increasingly limited resources require targeted approaches to library services and structure. Communicating with branch leadership and maintaining a centralized set of goals for all branches became increasingly difficult. Traditionally, we saw library branches as stand-alone units designed to serve every potential need a customer could have, regardless of whether that need actually existed. With more sophisticated data collection using our ILS and available external data, we now understand what our customers use at one branch versus another and monitor and measure through our management information systems and dashboard. The area concept empowers the five Area managers to create goals and experiment to improve the customer experience.

Group branches allow easy access to customer base with common behaviors. The new busines model serves common needs, allowing library to focus human and capital resources. Through this model we can create shared outcomes, generating a measurable process. This allows us to identify the target audiences for each Branch Area and define the outcomes the organization seeks to achieve for these target audiences. We can, in turn, determine the implementation strategies the organization should use to achieve these outcomes and establish the metrics by which progress is tracked.

Using the following Market Area Characteristics, PGCMLS is able to develop targeted service offerings; develop a product and service process to generate the desired outcomes; and measure the defined cluster outcomes to evaluate progress. The Library can measure outcomes for population growth, households with people under 18, education comparisons, elementary school reading proficiency, Maryland School Assessment average of elementary school scores within Area of Dominant Influence, household income, housing makeup (Rent vs. Owned), poverty rate, PC usage vs circulation, and languages other than English spoken in the home. Additionally, we were able to harvest 11 positions of branch managers to be distributed throughout the library system.