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Before you can decide where you want your business to go and how you are going to get there, you need to find out where you are now. SWOT and PEST analyses are techniques that can be used to help determine your position in your market.
SWOT stands for
- Strengths
- Weaknesses,
- Opportunities; and
- Threats
The idea is that you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your service, pinpoint opportunities and note threats.
It is important to be as objective as possible: what you might see as a strength may not be one from the client's point of view. For example, you may think that a 'large collection of books' is a strength,
but it may be more important to the users that the books should be up-to-date - they would be happier with a smaller collection if it were more current.
Therefore it is a good idea to take a brainstorming approach, and consider undertaking market research,
to test your hypotheses about strengths and weaknesses. Some factors (e.g. the internet) can be seen as both threats and opportunities.
PEST stands for the
- Political factors and legal factors
- Economic factors
- Social factors; and
- Technological factors
which will effect your service in the future.
If you are based within an organisation, you will want to look both at the environment affecting your parent company, and the environment within the company directly affecting you. For each set of factors, you need to look at the situation now, and what developments are likely to take place. Some people have added an extra item to PEST: another 'E' for Environment (as in 'green issues' environment, not just the business environment in general). Legal factors are also sometimes given their own letter, to form the acronym PESTEL.
- Political factors: include legal aspects (eg copyright), the general political ethos;
- Economic factors: include the effect of the economy (eg in recession) on individuals, and on organisations;
- Social factors: include demographic change (eg changes in proportion of age groups), changes in social habits (where people go to shop, leisure expectations), educational changes.
- There are obviously a wide range of technological factors affecting libraries and information centres (e.g. the Internet, telecommunications, the media in which people expect to find information).
Knowsley Public Libraries Strategic plan 1998-2000 (Adobe Acrobat pdf document) includes a SWOT and PEST analysis.
Another stage in the process is looking at the Competition. You will only be able to define competition precisely when you have defined your products and services, but you may want to define your product differently in reaction to competition as well.
For information centres, competition will come from different areas, eg:
- Academic library: internet, bookshops, other academics, departmental resource centres, electronic networks, the local copy shop, students lending to each other;
- Priced business information service: other Business Information Services (like Business Links), free reference libraries, other organisations offering business advice e.g. Chambers of commerce, businesspeople's colleagues, the internet;
- Company library: other information units in the company, banks and other business advice firms, other colleagues, information brokers, and (of course) the internet.
Having identified the competition, you need to decide where you are going to position yourself in relation to it. You will need to differentiate yourself from the competition; i.e., give your potential users a reason for preferring you to the competition.
It is also vital, of course, to identify the market for your service.
Bluffers will be doing quite well if they can remember what PEST and SWOT stand for. You can also score points by saying 'I always prefer to call it STEP' if anyone mentions PEST (and vice versa), or add lots of extra factors to form amusing acronyms e.g. Political Economic Social Technical Informational Legal Environmental Nutritional Commercial and Electronic (PESTILENCE)
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