what we do information management

Clarity’s Information Management (IM) Practice exists for a single purpose: to deliver competitive advantage to your organization through business intelligence that is accessible, actionable, and affordable.

Why should business intelligence take priority right now?

The research firms who track information technology and its impact on business and the economy are answering this question very clearly. According to Gartner, “tools that let users make faster, better and more-informed decisions are particularly valuable in a difficult business environment.” ¹

Forrester seconds this, adding “it can easily be argued that our current world economic crisis can be partially blamed on poor business intelligence.” ²

The question is not whether to move forward with BI initiatives when you have a clear mandate to cut costs. On the contrary; BI will tell you where to cut the costs. The real question is how to move forward with your BI initiatives—how best to scope and target them—in order to gain the most value.

BI is not an additional layer of complexity or a luxury that can wait for better times. BI is what will help your organization navigate the down economy and grow market share while less aware companies lose footing.

Consider some of the immediate goals that many organizations, regardless of industry or size, have in common right now:

• To evaluate fluctuating markets and identify competitive threats.
• To pinpoint new opportunities for revenue.
• To operate leaner and more efficiently, making the most out of all merger and acquisition activity.
• To reduce exposure and strengthen risk management.
• To improve visibility and compliance among increasing government regulations.
• To attract new customers and retain current ones.

The goals themselves have some things in common, too:

• They all seek adaptability and resilience in the midst of volatility.
• They all require data. More accurately, they require timely, trustworthy, and meaningful information—in other words, business intelligence.

Beyond BI’s power create the adaptable, resilient enterprise, there are other compelling reasons to invest in this technology:

• In any economy, information is currency that you can use to:

  • Increase revenue through more targeted products for more satisfied customers.
  • Decrease expenses through a clear understanding of underperforming products and unprofitable customers.

• Information is proliferating like never before—at about a rate of 15 petabytes per day. Here’s some perspective on that number: in 2006 the New York Times estimated that all of humankind’s published and broadcast works, from the dawn of civilization until right this minute, and translated into every language, can be compressed into 50 petabyte hard disks.

  If we account only for the information in individual organizations, the volumes are still staggering: IDC reports that enterprise data stores will grow an average of 60% annually in the effort to contain growing data, which includes structured database information as well as unstructured information scattered throughout Web 2.0 channels and desktop applications (which are also proliferating). BI is the technology that can organize and make sense of that information.

• Information quality is also an issue. Given the abundance of data sources, the prevalence of mergers and acquisitions, and the localized point solutions that companies tend to create, information easily becomes inconsistent, redundant, invalid, and incomplete. BI and its disciplines of data warehousing, data governance, data quality, and master data management can help your organization establish and maintain data that is clean and reliable.

• Your competitors are spending on BI initiatives. Gartner’s annual worldwide survey of more than 1,500 CIOs reveals that their number one technology priority for the last three years running is BI.

  Because of the weight that CIOs give BI, it is less affected by economic downturns than are some other technologies. For example, BI software revenue grew 11.2% to $5.8 billion in 2008, and is expected to grow to $7.7 billion by 2012. The market for BI services—to help companies configure, customize, and use all that software—is forecast to reach $20 billion by next year.

• Best-in-Class companies (measured in terms of customer service, employee productivity, and process efficiency) granted BI tools to 40% more employees than other firms did, according to a 2008 AberdeenGroup study.

  BI has become more accessible—vendors are combining its advanced capabilities with ease of use, which is facilitating its adoption by front line employees. Companies who take advantage of this are realizing a much more collaborative style of BI that infuses daily operations with contextual knowledge. As a result, employees can approach their jobs with more direction and understanding, and can take more appropriate actions in the course of their day.

Ready to use the recession to your advantage? Let us know what intelligence you need or send email to sales@clarity-us.com

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Why Clarity?

Despite all you know about the advantages of BI and the consequences of doing without it, you also know it can be fraught with hidden costs, including long term support requirements, incomplete user adoption, and poor assumptions about the health of existing data. Plus with current cutbacks, your mandate to do more with less is formal and unbending.

Clarity’s Information Management Practice can help.

We know that BI projects—perhaps some you’ve had to endure—can suffer from bloat and over-scoping. So we’ve built our IM practice on the tenets of cost effectiveness, straightforwardness, and experience.

Our approach to delivering BI aligns with best practices for eliminating hidden costs, minimizing your risk, lowering your total cost of ownership, and delivering measurable ROI:

• We work on the right things
• We deliver quick wins
• We make the most of what you already have
• We enable your users to actually use our solutions
• We enable BI in the context of everyday activities

• We work on the right things. You have a list—likely a long one—of current and potential BI projects. But do you know which of them are the right things for you, right now?

  For each item on your list, we help you quantify and honestly assess two factors: feasibility and business value. Then we start by building and delivering the projects that score high in both, giving you the most bottom-line impact and greatest scalability for the least up-front difficulty. We work our way through other projects from there, depending upon your budget and goals.

  Clarity is also an expert in BI environment analysis, strategic planning, and roadmap design. When you are ready, we can help you diagnose and develop your enterprise BI program from ground level.

• We deliver quick wins. In tough times, you don’t want to sponsor a comprehensive, big-bang deployment. Instead, you need to deliver specific objectives and tangible results in short timeframes.

  Clarity is an expert implementer in one-to-three month tactical engagements that address your most critical pain points, and that still support your overall BI strategy. Once these targeted solutions demonstrate value, and once your budget allows it, we expand them incrementally. This approach permits frequent releases as well as midstream changes if they are demanded by new business conditions, or new understanding on your part.

• We make the most of what you already have. This includes your technology, people, and data:

  • Technology: If your organization struggles with the basics of information management, you are not alone. A 2009 InformationWeek/Intelligent Enterprise.com study found that the top challenges for business technology professionals include the capabilities of accessing timely, reliable data and integrating, normalizing, and cleansing data. And Aberdeen’s studies of 6,000-plus companies over the past 18 months consistently show that data integration problems prevent BI projects from getting off the ground.

    So even while most organizations have some kind of BI program in place by now, an overwhelming number of these organizations aren’t operating with the full potential of their intelligence, because the nuts and bolts of that intelligence are breaking regularly.

    Clarity can help you get a leg up on the competition. Our consultants are leaders in the disciplines of data integration and data quality, including extract, transform, and load (ETL), data warehousing/data marts, and data discovery, profiling, cleansing, and standardization. Our technology skill set includes most back end storage platforms, front end delivery tools, and business source systems (such as CRM and ERP applications).

    We can protect and rationalize your IT investments by building your source-to-target pipelines within your current infrastructure, or by leveraging open source, SaaS, and hybrid approaches.

  • People: Clarity’s tactical approach extends to how we work with your employees and leverage their skills. To encourage collaboration among different interests, ensure BI project alignment with business goals, and promote governance from the beginning, we bring together a cross disciplinary team of both IT and business leaders and end users. If your organization has a BI competency center, we work within that group; if not, the team becomes a fledgling BICC that can grow and help support your BI solution over the long term.

  • Data: Ralph Kimball, one of the fathers of data warehousing, estimated this year that at least 70% percent of BI project risks and delays come from problems with the data itself. In fact, many end users believe that they are unhappy with their BI solution, when what they’re really unhappy with is the data underneath.

    Clarity is an expert in data, and our data quality services can help you achieve the fundamentals of completeness, accuracy, consistency, and timeliness:

    • We not only address the transactional data in your source systems; we also emphasize your business rules and terminology—the metadata that your data warehouse and data marts must use in order to parse and present the transactional data to you properly.
    • We measure data quality according to standards such as Six Sigma.
    • We treat data quality iteratively like any other aspect of a BI project so that you can account for new sources over time.

    Beyond our data quality services, Clarity can also streamline and optimize the metrics that you already collect in order to minimize noise and pinpoint the ones most critical to your business goals.

• We enable your users to actually use our BI solutions. One of the most common reasons for the failure of BI implementations is end users’ unwillingness or inability to use the tools. Clarity engages end users throughout the project lifecycle and continually maps our work to their requirements. This endows users with control and ownership, culminating in a BI solution that matches their skill sets, requires less arduous training, and facilitates widespread adoption.

• We deliver BI in the context of everyday activities. At one time, BI was available primarily to specialized analysts when they queried a database for a report. Today, BI is not only available to a much larger number of users, but it can actually find them, rather than only the other way around. This is “pervasive” BI, or “operational” BI because analytics capabilities are integrated with operational applications (like CRM or inventory control systems) that employees use daily.

  Clarity is experienced in integrating analytics with operational applications in several different ways, including through enterprise portals, Web services, and event-driven BI processing that generates real time alerts, recommendations, and automated actions. Whatever the approach you choose, pervasive BI will empower your employees and help you generate a much clearer, more frequent views of your performance.

Discover more about Clarity and the benefits of working with us.

Want to learn more about how we can help you specifically in your next IM endeavor? Send us email at sales@clarity-us.com.

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What are Clarity’s specific Information Management services?

Clarity is a BI/DW specialist. We offer full lifecycle services in this space, from organizational readiness to design, development, testing, implementation, knowledge transfer, and support.

Following are our core IM services:

Interested in any of our IM services? Let us know how we can help you.

Want to learn more first? Send email to sales@clarity-us.com.

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What are Clarity’s technical capabilities in Information Management?

Clarity is technology- and vendor-neutral so that our counsel is objective. We offer expertise in most commercial an open source BI/DW products and tools, and we work with customers to build their core capabilities in the tools they choose. Our BI/DW technology expertise includes the following:

Are you ready to get started on your information initiatives? Let us know what you are planning or send email to sales@clarity-us.com.

Are you a BI/DW practitioner with experience in any of the above technologies? If you’re ready to make your next career move, send us your resume or send email to resume_submission@clarity-us.com.

¹ Eric Thoo, Ted Friedman, Donald Feinberg, and Mark A Beyer. “Gartner Predicts 2009: Technology Changes Will Shape the Future of Data Management and Integration.” Gartner Special Reports (December 12, 2008).

² Pam Baker. “Business Intelligence, Part 1: Tools of the Trade for Decision Makers.” March 6, 2009. CRM Buyer, ECT News Network, Inc. May 22, 2009 http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/66385.html.

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