Building Successful Partnerships with Clients
Over the span of about 10 years, National Instruments (NI) and Enable Education have built a relationship that has supported NI to develop learning solutions that help them achieve their strategic goals. Together, we’ve worked on a number of projects that have evolved as NI’s learning ecosystem expanded to meet the needs of new business objectives.
While our partnering relationship with NI is one of our longest, Enable has built and continues to build partnerships with a range of different clients in a variety of industries. We’ve also been fortunate enough to partner with companies to develop projects that have a positive impact on our local communities.
Gretchen Edelmon (Principal Product Owner, Digital Learning Experience, NI) on the topic of Choosing a Development Partner.
NI
NI is multinational company of over 35 000 customers worldwide that equips engineers and scientists with systems that accelerate productivity, innovation, and discovery. The growing technical complexity of NI customer’s applications underscores the importance of ensuring the appropriate skillsets and technical knowledge to effectively meet their business challenges. Because NI is operating in an increasingly competitive space, effective customer education is key for NI to ensure essential knowledge transfer and maintain their dominant position in the market.
NI’s Education Services organization built a concept document with an ROI study to advocate for their projects to be prioritized with the web development team. NI found they would need to add capacity to their existing team to meet their customer education objectives. Once NI had determined what the gaps were in delivering on customer learning goals, they looked for a development partner who could help. And that’s where Enable Education and NI’s current partnership began.
The NI-Enable Partnership
NI and Enable’s partnership over the years has been based on NI bringing subject matter expertise on their business and Enable providing learning and learning-technology know-how. Our partnership is a longstanding one based on trust, transparency, and the acknowledgment of each partner’s specialization.
NI and Enable believe in having an education team comprising experts from diverse backgrounds, who view the world through different lenses. Enable’s team of learning experts offers a different perspective on learning challenges to internal subject matter experts. For example, a Software Architect will have an in-depth understanding of the product they have developed and be able to discuss its design and features at length. While this is helpful for particular audiences, it may not be the best solution for a novice user, like a new customer. Enable’s Learning Experience Designers consider the implications of the content from the perspective of the learner. Together these complementary perspectives create stronger, more robust solutions.
Over the years, as the industry has changed and NI has faced new challenges, the partnership between NI’s technical experts and Enable’s learning design experts, has been agile. As a result, NI has been able to make significant technological advances while ensuring a powerful learning experience for their clients.
How NI’s Learning Ecosystem Has Evolved
As NI has invested in building a robust learning ecosystem over the years, they have never lost sight of the importance of the customer experience. To that end, Enable has helped power the learning that provides the knowledge and skills needed for NI to reach their goals as they’ve grown.
From the very early days of printed learning manuals, to working with their current technologically advanced Learning Experience Platform (LXP), Enable has collaborated with NI to ensure essential information is communicated to learners in a compelling and engaging way so that NI’s business goals are achieved.
Online content repository
In 2011, Enable developed NI’s online content repository. Prior to the content repository, NI had provided a webpage for their academic customers to locate the information they needed.
Interactive learning framework
In 2014, one of NI’s clients, Universidad Tecnológica de México (UNITEC) (Technological University of México) needed learning support as they adopted NI technology for their engineering programs.
UNITEC had over 100 campus locations that were introducing NI technology and the professors required support with instructional lab content. Due to infrastructure challenges, in order to develop an interactive program, Enable and NI created an installable lightweight html framework that each student could use locally.
ELVIS enters the building
One of NI’s academic lab products is a learning platform called ELVIS (Engineering Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Suite). In 2015, NI embarked on making major updates to this platform: the hardware was fully redesigned, and the software had to be directly integrated to the learning experience.
NI’s leadership wanted something truly unique for this customer group and it was Enable’s job as a partner to paint a picture of what was possible. The development work included significant technical updates to the learning platform and the creation of a high volume of new content.
Online training
Late in 2019, NI made an important organizational shift. Their dispersed customer education team was rearranged into a true education services organization, and the move involved a significant shift from in-person classroom to virtual and on-demand training.
As part of this strategy, NI moved to a new LXP. This step required that existing systems, including customer accounts, data monitoring, and learner provisioning, be integrated into their new LMS. Throughout this shift, Enable has provided support and partnered with NI in creating great online learning experiences.
As NI continues to grow their software capability alongside their customers’ changing needs, customer education remains key.
Client Partnerships
The processes we’ve developed and the lessons we’ve learned during the growth of Enable’s relationship with NI have facilitated our successful partnering with other clients. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with a wide range of companies solving learning challenges and delivering an assortment of learning experiences.
Ben and Gretchen chat about the critical role partnerships play in a successful implementation, at the Cognition 2021 Conference.
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