Before a business can realize a return on a newly purchased technology, it has to convince employees to use it. Executives also need a way to quantify the return and mitigate potential project risks. Those tasks and other details are worked out through a process called change strategy development. This week, Boardroom Insight got an inside look at the topic from North Highland executive Nyla Beth Gawel. Plus, business updates from Armanino, Mission Cloud and Robert Half.

Nyla Beth Gawel joins North Highland as senior managing director. The executive was previously the CEO of NBG Strategy Consulting, a consultancy she founded in 2022. Gawel will work across North Highland’s workforce and change strategy practices, which help organizations carry out important business initiatives. That includes large-scale IT projects. According to Gawel, putting together a change strategy makes it easier to realize a return on such investments. 

“Boards today are approving significant investments in AI, modernization, operating model shifts, and growth initiatives – yet many organizations struggle to convert those investments into sustained, measurable enterprise value,” Gawel told Boardroom Insight. “Change strategy ensures that transformation efforts are architected with clear accountability, integrated roadmaps, defined value metrics, and disciplined oversight from day one – not retrofitted after momentum stalls.”

A change strategy can have many moving pieces, particularly at large companies. “It integrates workforce and technology decisions rather than treating them as parallel tracks. Governance structures, incentives, operating models, adoption frameworks, and data modernization must move together to reduce risk, accelerate performance, and improve ROI transparency.”

Sorting out all those details can be challenging for executives who also have other projects on their plate. That’s where consulting firms such as North Highland come into the picture. According to Gawel, the question that guides change strategy projects is “not ‘do we have a strategy?’ but ‘do we have the execution architecture to deliver and measure value?’. North Highland both answers the question and designs, creates and enables the necessary execution architecture to realize durable competitive advantage. ROI does not show up as a result of a strategy, ROI shows up through the execution of that strategy.”

In addition to change strategy development, North Highland helps clients with tasks such as securing more favorable rates from suppliers and deploying AI. It also has a pre-packaged software business. The firm offers applications that executives can use for tasks such as planning recruiting initiatives and visualizing business data.

Armanino partners with Accural. The collaboration is designed to make the former firm’s employees more productive. San Ramon, California-based Armanino is an accounting firm with more than 2,000 staffers. Accrual, in turn, sells a cloud platform that uses AI to automate common accounting tasks. Armanino will use the software to help its employees prepare clients’ tax returns more efficiently. The initiative is part of a long-term effort that will also see the firm apply AI to other use cases such as audit delivery.

Mission Cloud looks to lower clients’ cloud bills. The Illinois-based managed service provider helps organizations build and run AWS environments. It also finds unnecessary expenses in existing cloud deployments. Going forward, its engineers will perform the latter task with the help of a software platform called Vantage. The product, which is sold by a startup of the same name, visualizes how much a company spends on each AWS service in its stack. The platform detects sudden hardware usage spikes and forecasts future cloud spending.

A Boardroom Insight exclusive: Robert Half senior district president Ryan Skubis briefed us about his work earlier this week. The executive is responsible for the NYSE-listed recruiting giant’s business modernization initiative, which will see it deploy custom AI tools to make employees more productive. Robert Half helps companies recruit knowledge workers such as accounting professionals. It also has an IT consulting arm, Protiviti, that specializes in deploying and managing enterprise technology products.

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