COURSE NOTES FOR SPRING
Groups and Audit Exercise - Feb. 2, 2000

Groups. Below are four groups that we will use for various exercises and for the group presentation assignment later in the course. I have arbitrarily designated them A, B, C, D for ease in referring to them.

Group A	Group B	Group C	Group D
K.T. Lawson Jenny Simpson Autumn Winters	C.L. Quillen Paul Showalter Pavla Skarlantova	Peter Buch Clair de la Varre Gerry Lipscomb	Melissa Cain Jay Frimmel Rebecca Lee

Audit Exercise. For this exercise we will consider two organizations and use website information and your own experiences as all the information available to you. We will need on occasion to be critical and we will understand that criticism is a condition of learning and not carry it over into behaviors toward these two organizations that might be interpreted as unfriendly.

For each question below, Groups A and C will be asked to answer with respect to the SILS lab (http://ils.unc.edu/ils/silslab/) and Groups B and D will be asked to answer with respect to the SILS library (http://ils.unc.edu/ils/library"). We will have a series of group conferences to answer the question and then whole class reporting to compare and disucss.

Below are the questions:

1. Mission and Culture
   • What is the "business" for your organization?
     Group A for the Lab and Group B for the Library
   • What, in your opinion, would be a desireable organizational culture?
     Group C for the Lab and Group D for the Library

2. Strengths and Weaknesses
   • What are the organization's strengths? -- Groups A and B
   • What are the organization's weaknesses? -- Groups C and D

3. The Publics
   • Who are the Input Publics and Who are the Internal Publics? -- Groups A and B
   • Who are the Intermediary Publics and Who are the Consuming Publics? -- Groups C and D

4. The Competitors
   • Who are the "Desire" Competitors and Who are the "Generic" Competitors? -- Groups A and B
   • Who are the "Service" Competitors and Who are the "Enterprise" Competitors? -- Groups C and D

5. The Offer and Market Opportunities
   • For Existing Markets, what opportunities exist for greater market penetration, or for new offerings to the same market? -- Groups A and B
   • For New Markets, what opportunities exist for the same offerings to new publics, or for new offerings to new publics? -- Groups C and D

We might not complete this exercise today but we'll get a feel for some of the aspects of examing an organization and its surroundings.

Page revised Feb. 2, 2000.