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Clarity Launches Information Management Practice

Clarity adds business intelligence and data warehousing services to help companies capture, organize, and use data

Clarity Resource Group, a 2007 “Fast 50” growing company•, announced the launch of its new Information Management (IM) consulting practice. Complementing Clarity’s existing Application Development and Finance and Accounting practices, the new IM practice focuses on business intelligence and data warehousing (BI/DW), the discipline of enhancing decision-making by collecting data and using it to generate past, present, and predictive views of business operations.

“The IM practice expands and formalizes what Clarity was already doing in the application development space,” said Jim Urhausen, the company’s founder and partner. “For several years now, we’ve been building systems that help our clients acquire better data, or interact more productively with their customers, or return more thorough analysis. Now in addition to approaching those activities on a project-by-project basis, we can also approach them as part of a holistic program.”

Leading the new practice is BI/DW industry expert John Papadia, who joins Clarity as a partner. Formerly a practice leader of the Communications, Media, and Entertainment group at Knightsbridge, one of the world’s top BI/DW consultancies, Papadia managed, strategized, architected, and delivered many of the Fortune 500’s data environments. When Hewlett-Packard acquired Knightsbridge in late 2006, Papadia continued his work there, managing a high-profile clientele, a team of more than 100 practitioners, and a budget that reached $20 million.

“Clarity is excellently positioned to enter the BI market and excel,” said Papadia. “We’re a small company, so we can be as innovative and responsive as our clients ask us to be. At the same time, we have large-sized intellectual capital, skill sets, and experience on board, so we understand what our clients need in terms of meaningful data and can bring it to them.”

Industry analysts agree that the next few years will be an opportunity for smaller BI/DW firms as the large technology vendors, including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP, regroup after a year of market consolidation. Successful BI remains as much an art as it is a science, and the smaller firms are often more readily able to customize and, when necessary, change direction or incorporate unexpected requirements.

“The key to a productive BI/DW implementation is an optimized combination of best practices and personalization, and that combination is different for every client,” said Papadia. “That’s what’s exciting about Clarity. We know the standards; we perform up to and beyond them. But if you focus only on standards, you’ll never be that much different from your competitors. We also look at how we can set our clients apart in their industries.”

The market has certainly bought into the concept of business intelligence, both literally and figuratively. Recognizing the power of putting actionable data into the hands of business professionals and executives rather than only analysts and IT specialists, companies spent more than $12 billion in BI tools in 2007, and more than double that amount in BI services.

Also driving this spending is what’s going on with the data at these companies. Mergers and acquisitions, new distribution channels, widening customer bases, and more lines of business mean that data is often scattered, siloed, inconsistent, and frequently changing, which prevents companies from getting a true picture of their customers, or of their performance relative to competitors. BI/DW addresses the issues caused by large data volumes and multiple data sources.

Entering the market’s consciousness in the late eighties, BI/DW evolved from decision support systems to become a “stack” that consists of business processes, the technologies that enable them, the platforms that support them, the data that both feeds and results from them, and the people who participate in them. It requires a sound logical architecture that can translate into one or more physical architectures depending upon variables like geography, regulatory requirements, and customer demands.

Designing and deploying a strong BI/DW environment requires much communication between a company’s business and IT staffs—or between a company and a vendor or advisor—as well as detailed input from end users, custom integration between disparate systems, and room for hands-on adjustments once an initial environment has been established. It’s a mission filled with tasks that by nature are largely manual, and thus are only as effective as the practitioners who undertake them. This means yet another competitive advantage for Clarity, which maintains a specialty in human capital.

“Clarity has proven its leadership in advanced recruiting and staffing,” said Urhausen. “We’ve retained a wide network of senior-level IT and business professionals, and we continue to identify and attract new talent. Now with the IM practice, we’ve augmented that network with a consulting bench of BI/DW specialists. The teams that we can assemble for our clients really are formidable.”

The new IM practice is located in Chicago, where Papadia is based, and serves clients on a nationwide basis.

• An award from the Austin Business Journal, which named Clarity Resource Group as number one among professional services firms in the region.