NLI Overview

About Northern Lights Inc.

NLI is an executive consulting firm. We specialize in helping organizations manage transforming change. We are most effective when we work with staff members and organizations who aim to be client-centered, value-added and cost effective. We believe technological change is constant and rapid. we offer tools and services to accomodate this fact and to create a strategic framework tailored to an organization, their clients and their services.

NLI has spent the last decade actively helping our clients succeed. We have developed some definite ideas about what works. We work daily to stay abreast of current trends and technbologies related to information and content management in order to help our clients maintain a strategic advantage.

We provide services and tools that will support you and your organization in creating sustainability through the value you add to those you serve as you leverage your technology investment.

Coaching and Process Tools
For understanding technology's impact, managing organizational change and leveraging your technology investment
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To transform yhour organization for the Digital Age.

Significant Outcomes for our Clients

* You will create and maintain relationships with those you serve that match what you do with what they do both today and into the future

* You will change your organization's culture and sustain the ability to change over time

* You will understand how to manage your costs to increase your organization's efficiency and effectiveness

* You will be able to think strategically and make strategic decisions before you create a strategic plan

* You will understand how to leverage all of your infrastructure investments

* You will be able to assess your organization's readiness to move ahead and evaluate the results of your decisions

Design & Implementation Assumptions

Our experience has led us to some fundamental assumptions and guidelines:

* Technological change is constant and ever more rapid - so you can never rest in understanding the impact of change on your clients or your organization.

* Technological change is constant and ever more rapid. It is therefore essential that any system or service design not only accommodates regular change, but also facilitate it. We have found rapid prototyping, frequent testing, and regular user feedback keep the cost of change low and consistently add more value and result in more satisfied clients/users. While traditional business and action plans relate to a strategic framework, today's rate of technological change is too fast for a five-year framework. A more viable approach is- try it, test it, change it - over no more than a three-year cycle.

* Integration is a key framing parameter in any system/service design and implementation. Whether it concerns documents, multimedia assets, or applications, the ability to integrate is an essential concern and should inform all parts of the design, development and implementation process. In our experience, this usually necessitates cooperative work between IT staff and staff with domain expertise. Each must understand the consequences of design choices on information creation, management and distribution in a networked environment and be able to intelligently weigh the trade-offs involved. Integration as a design parameter also usually necessitates a major change in the information management culture of an organization, most especially as individual units create, manage and distribute the data they produce.

* Knowledge management is the ultimate goal of most our clients' systems and service designs. KM theory aside, to our clients, knowledge management means getting the right information to the right person when they need it to make decisions. Long-term goals include the ability to machine-process "smart tagged data" to provide new knowledge. NLI supports these goals, but until a full set of software and standards are practical for a complete implementation, we encourage our clients to design approaches that include ways to provide semantic meaning to data and that leverage the availability of the Web, Internet protocols and platform neutrality.

* Opportunity cost needs to be considered in its full perspective. To us, this means analyzing and designing models of information services that consider the cost of integration, update, maintenance, etc. We've seen firsthand the problems inherent when IT departments impose systems solutions without proper communication with impacted staff. But we have also seen the equally serious problems that occur when individual departments create information management systems that do not include consideration of vital IT issues. Our experience shows us it's essential for IT personnel to work closely with departmental staff to develop viable information solutions.

* Students, faculty, and other staff members are adopting, applying, and innovating in their use of rapidly changing technologies -so you have to see where they are and where your current services and programs fit.

* Your organization can never be all things to all people - but you can settle on a number of customized service models (different combinations of infrastructure investments) that are highly value-added.

* When your organization is indispensable to your primary clientele you will have succeeded - so your challenge is to find the right mix of organizational costs and the "value" that you add to clients as seen through their eyes.

* No change is without risk - but you can assess the risk and make your decisions about new directions accordingly.

* The University's technological investments (hardware, software, control mechanisms, people, skills, and support) are vastly important to university sustainability and must be leveraged (the most outcomes possible for the investment.) - You must understand your technological infrastructure in an environment broader than just your unit and just your university.

* Environments and contexts are changing as a result of changes in technologies and how people use them, so you cannot assume you know what those changes are. You have to talk to your clientele regularly. You have to build ongoing relationships with your known clients and those who might benefit from the new models of service you're developing.

As these assumptions and others like them hold over time, the organizations that succeed will be led by staff members who are listeners, learners, and decision-makers in the broadest contexts possible. Our Northern Lights Inc. tools provide new (yet structured) processes for staff members to develop and apply new skills that bring flexibility and continual learning.
In our coaching we do not tell people what to do. Rather we teach and train with methodologies that work over time and across environments.
Within the context of these assumptions, we always ask clients not to assume that their organization's future will be like its past - i.e., do not assume environment. We provide a Technology Landscape Report to understand and consider possible new conceptual models.

Our final assumption is that the only viable beginning point is the client, how they work, and what their behaviors are. Our tools are for staff members who want their organizations to be client-centered, value-added, and cost effective.

Opportunity Costs, Sustaining Relationships, and Leveraged Investments

All of our experience with rapidly changing technology environments indicates that significant levels of time, money, energy, and trust can be wasted when the technologies and software applications are imposed and/or applied to enhance current services rather than looking at leapfrogging possibilities. When this occurs, the opportunity cost is high.

This same environment is often characterized by rocky relationships between the staff members implementing a technology and those who will be using or otherwise applying the technology. In our experience, there are four constraining dynamics that can result in stalemating successful change.
2. There are many alternative ways to add value when implementing a system. We advise our clients to find the mix of value-adding approaches that have the closest fit to your user behaviors
3. Implementing staff members assume that they know what users need and are doing. We urge our clients to test all environmental assumptions against user behavior and commensurate ways of adding value
4. The risks in making major changes in implementation (i.e., implementing new models of service) seem greater than the time and other available resources, so what do we stop doing? We encourage clients to relate costs to the value added and to their conformation to appropriate conceptual models
One of our important goals in this environment of understanding and managing change is to have our clients be able to successfully monitor the very real concepts of opportunity cost and leveraging potential. Every dollar of opportunity cost is a dollar that cannot be leveraged. Every minute of opportunity cost is a minute that cannot be leveraged. Every ad hoc implementation that cannot be integrated into a large goal of the enterprise is an implementation constrained by the present and less valuable in the future. Every implementation path that is not grounded in the work of building sustaining relationships is an implementation that will have a high opportunity cost that cannot be leveraged. We encourage enterprise-wide solutions that emphasize integration, based on users' information usage behaviors.

Our intention in working through the NLI methodology and Toolkits with our clients is to limit the opportunity costs as much as possible, build relationships between those implementing and those applying that will sustain the effective management of change over time, and leverage every immediate technology investment looking across the enterprise and toward the future.

Importance of Clients to Definition and Creation

Client-centered interview discussions are at the heart of defining, creating, and implementing services and service models. From the implementer’s perspective, talking with people about how they do their work, the ways they use technologies, the problems they are trying to solve, and the decisions they have to make, provides the real world context for considering how to add value in conceptualization, design and implementation. With that knowledge and understanding in hand, the implementers frame decisions about what they are going to do, how they are going to do it, and when — always with the goal of adding value from the clients’ perspective.

At this point, an iterative loop begins that continues over the life of the client/implementer relationship — the implementers return to clients saying this is what we heard; these are the major forces, trends, and conceptual models that we think are important to consider; this is what we think is important to do; this is the way we will add value to the way you do your work given the resources we have available to us; this is how we are going to assess the outcomes; and this is how we will continue our working relationship. The clients, then, are able to assess the implementation impact on how they do their work; to understand the context for the implementation decisions; to assess the value adding that is part of the implementation; to discuss what they think about possible alternatives, constraints, or possibilities for resource availability; and so forth.

This ongoing dialog not only results in sustaining relationships, but also limits opportunity costs and supports leveraged decision-making. The other important intention of iterative client-centered discussions is for implementers to keep up with changes in client behaviors that can serve as harbingers of changing patterns of technology use among clients across the enterprise. In this regard, client-centered interview discussions are the bedrock for thinking strategically about models of service and resource decisions.

When our Services are Helpful

* When you want to build organizational capacity or create financial sustainability

* When you want to become a more valuable organization for those you serve

* When you have a problem with changes related to technology or you want to take greater advantage of your technology investment

* When your usership is declining

* When you want to assess your organization's readiness to move ahead

* When you have problems with funding

* When you are planning a new building or physical plant renovation

NLI Toolkits Overview

Northern Lights Inc. Toolkits help you:
Build good working relationships to prepare for change management

Assess your organization's current ability to add value, manage costs, and take advantage of current and emerging technologies

Explore the broadest contexts and greatest leverage possible in new technologies

Talk with your colleagues/clients about how they work, use available technologies, and think about new technologies to lay the groundwork for new approaches

Identify working patterns and new service models that would result in a more efficient and effective organization

Analyze new service models from various strategic perspectives to facilitate staff decisions about changing the organization

Work together to develop a list of necessary infrastructure investments, a transition plan, new service model prototyping, and value-based evaluation

Northern Lights Toolkit 1

Toolkit 1 - Discovering Behaviors & Building Relationships
Develop an understanding of current constituency information seeking and other behaviors. Toolkit 1 supports the profiling of patterns of changes in information seeking and use behaviors; related technology adoption and innovation diffusion patterns; implications for services, programs, and content; and implications for potential changes in institutional infrastructures (e.g., content, staff numbers and staff skills, physical plant, equipment, technology, policies, etc.)

Northern Lights Toolkit 2

Toolkit 2 - Seeing Patterns and Models of Service
Explore customization for major clientele groups whose members share similar patterns of change. Considerations include potential timing, technology adoption and innovation diffusion status, as well as preliminary cost considerations. Based upon this analysis you can develop new or enhanced models of service.

Northern Lights Toolkit 3

Toolkit 3 - Assessing Potential New or Enhanced Models of Service

Assessing your Organization's Strategic Infrastructure Readiness
Consider the strategic state of your organization and its infrastructures as you contemplate change options. These strategic readiness considerations incorporate thinking about older infrastructures you may not yet have acquired, taking advantage of today's infrastructure investments, and looking ahead to future technologies or other infrastructures. Considerations also include potential timing, technology adoption and innovation diffusion states as well as cost considerations.

Assessing Your Organization's Readiness To Add Value
Consider the convergence between potential costs and value you may add as a result of managing change decisions. The tool includes an assessment of the value you place on innovation, strategic match, degree of strategic uncertainty, adding more value to your clients in terms of resource investments and categorizing potential process changes in support of changing client information seeking and use behaviors.

Considering Costs And Modeling Efficiency And Effectiveness
Capture major infrastructure investments and how they contribute to unit costs of any organizational activity. You can then model alternative approaches to change, as they would affect infrastructure investments, unit costs, and the interrelationship of efficiency and effectiveness.

Innovating Analysis
Analyze how you might maximize the changes and investments you are considering as they have an impact on the institution as a system. Considerations that relate to further gain include the following. First, can you leverage the change-related infrastructure investments to other institutional activities? Second, can you scale your infrastructure investments to support additional users or activities? Third, can you replicate someone else's design, or design your approach so others could replicate it? Fourth, can you take advantage of innovating investments? Finally, can you ensure interoperability of technological and content design?

Making Decisions, Creating Transitions And Evaluating Results
Develop a three-year transition plan, taking into account investments in all of your infrastructures, a feedback loop to maintain relationship-building with constituencies; a communication plan to coordinate discussions among staff members, Directors, Board Members, and constituencies; and annual monitoring of capacity building for the organization and its staff members.