ABOUT NICK
© Nick Kern, Orkney
Nick has experience reinventing service delivery and helping organizations achieve a higher level of service quality, productivity and customer service while creating an enjoyable, challenging, positive work culture. His extensive outreach and marketing experience enables him to effectively communicate, deal with creative problem-solving, and turn demanding situations into customer-centric solutions. Integrity, innovation, respect, service equity, accountability, transparency and good stewardship are part of his guiding principles that he embraces with everything he does. He has partnered, created and helped craft policies and services regarding marketing, community outreach, advertising, social media, design, video (film), design, publications, language access, plain language, alternate formats, emerging communication technologies, ADA (508) and brand image.
MY TOOLKIT
(resources, abilities and skills)
PUBLIC SERVICE LANGUAGE ACCESS, OUTREACH AND DESIGN.
Nick helps guide programs on the essential importance to provide plain English, alternate formats and easy English that helps formulate precise communications in languages the community reads, utilizes, understands and speaks. In addition, he can assist with fostering and establishing operational and technology supports to help provide information about public services that are proper, understandable and identify with the intended audience. These interactions with the community using translations, interpretations and other communications need to be timely, accurate and culturally relevant.
AGILE WORKFORCE AND SOLUTIONS DEVELOPMENT
Nick has helped implement and foster a culture that utilizes agile operating models. The approach in the public sector has increased the ability to reconfigure strategy, organizational structure, processes, people, and technology adoption quickly and efficiently toward value-creating and value protecting opportunities. Nick's experience with becoming a more agile operation, significantly whilst supporting emergency health information during COVID-19, helped further programs in becoming a more people-centred culture that can operate using rapid learning and fast decisions that are enabled by technology and guided by aligned values to co-create value for each other, those they serve and their stakeholders.
STAFF DEVELOPMENT AND LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Nick served three years on the Oregon Public Managers Association (PMA) and as president for two of those years, from 2018 to 2021. The PMA offers public managers opportunities to collaborate and share experiences, improve performance and enhance their skills. The PMA is a resource for leaders to gain and exchange information by sponsoring programs and events that focus on leadership development in government.
Nick recently completed a consultation project for the State of Oregon's largest public service agency where the client and CAO of the organization stated, "Nicholas brings to this topic and the ever-growing breadth of this knowledge and insights into the relationship between training, leadership and organizational outcomes".
TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION IMPLEMENTATIONS
Recently completed a technology business feasibility study to create a digital solutions service centre that fosters continuous improvement through the use of eform’s, technology-driven business automation and modern asset management. This solution is currently in place, and the forms and automation modernization is ongoing. The solution was recently used for an executive order to help remove the public’s barriers to receiving public records. Nick and his team received a thank you note from the governor for the solution.
CROSS-FUNCTIONAL COLLABORATION
Nick has experience establishing ongoing training and leadership development resources for cross-functional workgroups and is in the final stages of deploying modern learning sharing systems and methods in his current role. The purpose is to enable staff to share experiences effectively, be aware of multifaceted project responsibilities, own their accountability, and share their knowledge gained with others using social media, knowledge management systems, collaborative forums, and best practices.