CHERRYVILLE, N.C. — Donna Beringer knows the value of institutional memory and is using technology to secure with software what's often kept only in gray matter at many organizations.

Beringer is CEO of $21 million Carolina Federal Credit Union, a job she assumed not long after the unexpected death of the CU's founding manager and CEO, Jack Jenkins.

As it turns out, the credit union had lost not only its leader of 35 years, but a wealth of critical information, including the kind of knowledge that Carolina FCU is now loading into a new solution called AgilityPro from AgilityPlus, a two-year-old startup based in Dandridge, Tenn.

AgilityPro is described by its owners as “a resource management software tool that allows your organization to better manage all resources, including knowledge, people, processes, possessions and more.”

Using a dashboard that includes alert and prioritization capabilities, the software allows organizations to track goals and projects, monitor activities and capture knowledge that, as Beringer found out, can easily vanish when employees retire, quit or die.

“When this credit union lost its CEO, it lost a lot of information, even though they had a very stable staff,” Beringer said.

Information was stored in various ways in various places, and in some cases, apparently not at all.

“One of the first situations I found when I came on board in 2004 was that the business plan that had been provided to the NCUA had expired in 2003,” Beringer said. “So here we needed a new three-year business plan, and I had no idea what was in the previous one. I didn't even know where to find it. So basically I had to start from scratch.”

A similar situation existed in investments, Beringer said. “Our previous CEO had been very hands-on and the board was not very active, so when I came in, nobody else knew what our money was in. It turns out there was a lot of money sitting around not making money.”

As a result, Beringer said, she has spent a lot of her time the past three years writing policies and procedures and gathering other information that now will be placed into the new system from AgilityFour (www.agilityfour.com).

AgilityPro and the company that produces it are the brainchild of some familiar names in credit union land. The company president is Kai Ravnborg, the former founder and president of CU Solutions, a South Carolina-based core processor he sold to Jack Henry & Associates. He previously had been with NCUA, where he was a key developer of the agency's asset-management system.

Stephen Gilmour, chief technology officer, was a primary developer and architect of the Symitar Episys home banking system and a pioneer in the use of multi-vendor single sign-ons. The rest of the crew comprises Chad Dalton, senior developer and veteran software developer from Symitar; Nathan Harvard, a developer at NCUA for 19 years and project manager for the automated 5300 Call Report system and other key projects; and Laurissa Grubb, marketing director, formerly of the Virginia Credit Union League, who helped create the Credit Union Marketing Council of Virginia.

The wheels started spinning shortly after Gilmour left Symitar and contacted Ravnborg, who was living on a farm near Dandridge and had been thinking about new ways to work with old problems.

“During my days at CU Solutions, we worked with hundreds of credit unions with small staffs. It could be software or database or network issues, but so many times people would figure something out and it would only be in their heads, and then when the problem popped up again six months later, they might not be there,” Ravnborg said.

“And then when we were acquired by Jack Henry, it was a different world. We went from 20 people to a 3,000-person shop, with all these resources, but again, often you'd find there was no central place to get information about problems that you know had been solved before,” he said.

Figuring there was a better way, Ravnborg and Gilmour began working on what would become AgilityPro. Four credit unions are now using the solution, as well as one community college.

“We were thinking credit unions of $25 million or less when we designed it, but it can work for credit unions large and small,” said Ravnborg.

The software, which resides on a host server and is accessed online by clients, uses the traditional tree structure to organize areas of interest, including human resources, payroll, forms of various kinds, compliance, membership information, accounting and whatever else the credit union deems necessary.

“We designed it very generically,” Ravnborg said. “You build that tree structure based on what makes your organization tick, making a record of all the different skills and paths that make that happen.”

Currently, only the credit union's upper management is using the knowledge base. Beringer, herself a longtime credit union professional whose resume includes a stint as Navy Federal Credit Union's manager in Guantanomo Bay, said she figured it will take about six months to gather and structure the initial information, and then it will be made available to board members and employees.

“Having this system will avoid the situation we've been in before, where things have not gotten done and the knowledge of how to do things was no longer there,” the Carolina FCU CEO said.

“This will allow us to coordinate policies, track compliance and will generally be the organizational tool we need to stay on top of things,” especially helpful in a 3,300-member credit union where staff wears so many hats, Beringer said.

Ravnborg, the AgilityFour founder, said, “Hopefully nothing happens to Donna, of course, but if for some reason she wasn't there, whoever comes in to take her place can see what the organization's goals are, its action plans, what's occurring there, just by clicking.”

Beyond an evolving store of institutional knowledge, the AgilityPro system also offers the ability to track the specific capabilities of individual staffers, knowledge that can
be used for training and succession.

In fact, Beringer said, she plans to make that part of annual performance reviews, one of a number of efficiencies she sees the new solution bringing to her organization.

The AgilityPro's benefits will continue to unfold over time, its co-creator said.

“Like Donna said, this is a process. It's empowering a culture change that needs to happen,” Ravnborg said. “It's not software that gets loaded and then everything just happens in a couple weeks.”

–mrapport@cutimes.com

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Carolina FCU Uses New Software From Tech Veterans to Manage Knowledge

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