Educational Research Service (ERS)

Problems Solved: Losing Competitive Position and Declining Revenues, Rising Costs, Need for New Technologies – e-Knowledge Portal		Strategic Focus: Leading/Navigating Change, Crafting/Executing Strategy, Leveraging Technology, Creating e-Knowledge Repositories, Transforming Facilities Design, Discovering Expeditionary Products, Transforming Organizational Culture, Developing Staff and Organizational Capacity, and Reinventing Revenues.
Project Team:  Donald Norris, Rhea Blanken, Jon Gunn, and Phil Taylor.

The Educational Research Service is a non-profit organization that was formed by the major professional associations serving administrative professionals in K-12 education.  ERS has served as a dependable source of research on evidence-based practice, made available through subscription channels to K-12 superintendents and other administrators.  However, ERS’s competitive position had been declining and it was not well positioned to take advantage of Web-based resources and commerce.

Strategic Initiatives has facilitated a year-long repositioning project to assess ERS’s market position and create a new vision and set of value propositions for ERS’s mission of service to its stakeholders.  We used our Value Web methodology to map ERS’s current and future value propositions and the migration paths necessary to achieve them. Together, Strategic Initiatives and ERS have fashioned a new role for ERS as a knowledge repository, making available to users personalized collections of knowledge on K-12 practice, either through subscription or on a pay-per-use basis.  They are working with technology providers to create a knowledge portal that will enable practicing administrators to search ERS’s body of knowledge by topic, select and combine key resources, add their own resources to the mix, and create PDFs with the compilation of resources.  The knowledge portal contains substantial e-learning, community of practice, and collaborative tools, as well.

The ERS solution also provides co-branded knowledge portals for ERS’s partner associations such as the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) and their state associations.  This solution enables ERS to autonomically track revenue shares for participants who provide intellectual property and/or direct buyers to the portal. 

Strategic Initiatives is also working with ERS to reshape roles and responsibilities of ERS staff, redesign physical facilities, and build the new competencies necessary for its role as an e-knowledge utility.  This is a substantial change management endeavor.