65 A COOPERATIVE SPIRIT CHAPTER THREE The late Brian Wolf, NISC COO from 2004 to 2008, brought project management practices to NISC, paving the way for staff to achieve a 100 percent completion rate on new Member implementations. Wolf was committed to situational leadership that supported the needs of individuals and teams. Before coming to NISC in 2004, Wolf worked for Basin Electric Power Cooperative in Bismarck and as the first Chief Information Officer for the state of Montana. He threw himself into his work at NISC and its commitment to servant leadership. To take on his role at NISC, he moved his family from North Dakota to Missouri. “He only wanted to help [CEO] Vern [Dosch] make this a great company,” says his wife, Kathy, who works in scheduling for NISC’s Automated Mailroom Services (AMS). A nonsmoker, Wolf rarely missed a day at the office and worked up until a week before his death. Even when he was gaunt and weak from his chemotherapy treatments, Wolf insisted on presenting before the Member Information Conference. Today, a bench near the walking path on the Lake Saint Louis campus memorializes him. But his true legacy is reflected in his impact on individuals as well as operations at NISC. Horizon had an interface between utility billing and the general ledger; iVUE didn’t yet have that capability. Some of the data had to be entered manually. (Programmers updated iVUE frequently in that first year, and enhancements continued at a regular pace.) The Capital Electric implementation had a theme — “One bite at a time.” Deb Burke’s father, a cartoonist, drew a picture of an elephant with a bite taken out, which became their logo. They would persevere and overcome challenges little by little. As at Central Indiana, on Go Live Day, the first calls came in with a team from NISC standing by to help. Weeks of training and monthsofpreparationpaidoff.Bytheafternoonbreak,itwasclear thateverythingwasworking—andtheco-opandNISCemployees celebrated with a cake with the logo, on elephant plates. “It was a big sense of relief and accomplishment,” says Shelley Ness, who was a Billing Supervisor at Capital Electric and is now a Support Specialist at NISC. Another moment of anxiety came when it was time to process Capital’s first bills on iVUE. The font size had changed, and there were some issues in the bill printing. Michelle Ward, now Luecal, who was then Vice President for People Services at NISC, along with Burke and other NISC employees came to the rescue, manually stuffing bills into envelopes to make sure they were mailed on time. “I always knew NISC was there for us, no matter what happened,” Ness says. It took years to roll out the new software, as Telecom