64 THE POWER OF POSSIBILITY NISC | 50 YEARS OF INNOVATION AND MEMBER SERVICE leadership style that supports the needs of individuals and teams. In recog- nition of his passion for learning, NISC’s training program is now called the Brian Wolf National IT Learning Center. “He was a champion for the employee and the value of growing the employee to better serve the Member,” says Pat Shafer, who worked for Wolf and helped establish the learning center. She is now an NISC Sr. Consultant for Organizational Development. His focus on project management led to integrated products. Implementing software at new Member sites could be difficult and time-consuming, but he added structure to the process. Employees trained as project managers would plan, execute and monitor the work, bringing together people from different departments as necessary. He organized a team to define service excellence, creating standards for customer support. That culture lives on at NISC. “When Brian Wolf came, that’s really when things changed,” says Doug Wilmes, Team Lead of Professional Services. “We saw a better way to do things.” GO BIG: BRIAN WOLF’S LEGACY LIVES ON We have to be able to change our tires going 60 miles an hour. If we can’t do that, we’re likely to fall into a ditch. As in one of his favorite sayings, Brian Wolf was someone who could metaphoricallychangetireswhilezoomingdownthehighway—anagileleader comfortable with constant change, a Chief Operating Officer who steered his company toward best practices, a family man full of corny but meaningful expressions. He liked to say, “Go big or go home,” and he exemplified that mantra with his passion, his larger-than-life persona and his impact on NISC. Wolf died in 2008 at the age of 46 after a battle with lung cancer, but his legacy lives on at NISC through the project management practices he brought to NISC and his emphasis on professional development of employees. For example, Wolf encouraged training all supervisors in coaching skills, an approach patterned after Ken Blanchard’s “situational leadership,” a their day-to-day workflow, but the functionality for other NISC Members, too. “It was a pretty exciting challenge,” says Debbie Roberts, who was in customer billing at Central Indiana at the time. “You had to really stop and think what we really wanted to see and what would be beneficial to everybody.” Implementers today are the picture of calm confidence, born of experience. But in 2003, they were adjusting to the new software, too, which remained a work in progress. “We were still dealing with learning things about the iVUE software that had to be enhanced and capturing the things that weren’t working the way we wanted them,” says Keith Horntvedt, Sr. Manager of Professional Services. DanWilbanksjoinedtheteamonsiteforGoLiveDay.Years of intense effort culminated in this moment. The morning calls came in, and with a little coaching, the customer service reps navigated their new screens. “The last day we were on site, we had cake and party hats and kind of celebrated a little bit,” recalls Rex Moorman of the NISC staff. But of course, that was just the beginning. In April 2004, Capital Electric Cooperative in Bismarck became the first site to move from Horizon, the NCDC legacy system, to iVUE. Along with the usual travails of converting data to be accessible to the new software, Capital Electric needed to cope with gaps, differ- ences between the Horizon system and iVUE. For example,