Barquin International: Leverage Data into Actionable Decisions

Ramon C. Barquin’s extensive experience in the field of knowledge management, analytics and IT strategy—he was the co-founder and first president of The Data Warehousing Institute—gives him a rich insight into the challenges that industries are facing today. The President and CEO of Barquin International, Barquin believes that the combination of three significant factors—inability of enterprises to keep up with the volumes and sources of data streams; the attempt to incorporate the large volumes of unstructured data into business intelligence; and the challenge of integrating Big Data with an organization’s internal data in order to focus on business intelligence— are acting as the major pain points for enterprises.

Headquartered in Washington, DC, Barquin International helps organizations to leverage complex data into enhanced actionable decisions. For 2 decades, the company has been helping U.S. Federal Government agencies, intelligence, and defense organizations to access data, store it efficiently and effectively, and train their staff on how to access it and make decisions based on their findings. “When the organizational challenge involves conquering the overwhelming flow of data, we provide a custom-built, vendor-neutral solution that allows our client to manage its data efficiently, within a business intelligence strategy,” says Barquin.

Business Intelligence Explorer (BIx), Barquin’s flagship platform, was developed leveraging the company’s unique skills and experience to provide customers with state-of-the art ‘Collaborative Business Intelligence’ and ‘Collaborative Decision Making.’ The product provides a graphical and intuitive interface allowing users to access and manage aggregated information for decision support. It was specifically designed to meet the needs of federal agencies and is currently installed in several government organizations. BIx gives the users “bird’s-eye” view and the ability to drill down to detail thus serving the needs of management, subject-matter experts and stakeholders in any organization.

Barquin solutions operate on a wide range of clients and server configurations that conform to open system standards facilitating a large customer base that includes the General Services Administration, the Census Bureau, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Agriculture in the U.S.

Research, Education, and Economic Information System (REEIS) was developed for the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), an agency under the USDA, in response to the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform (FAIR) Act of 1996. The FAIR Act required the development and implementation of a state-of-the art comprehensive, integrated system for monitoring and evaluating research, education, and extension activities conducted or supported by the USDA. The project was expanded to include the Leadership Management Dashboard (LMD), which provides State Partners, Agency Executives, National Program Leaders, Program Specialists, and Program Assistants at NIFA with actionable business information in a format that is both intuitive and insightful. To design, develop, implement, and maintain REEIS and LMD, USDA, NIFA contracted Barquin International, the skills and experience of which resulted into a highly successful and comprehensive, integrated system for monitoring and evaluating research, education, and extension activities conducted or supported by the USDA and the LMD Application, providing actionable data to the NIFA Leadership Team.

To that portfolio NIFA added REEport, which provides access to over 19,000 users nationwide and is the first data collection initiative that integrates seamlessly with existing applications, inside and outside NIFA, to share and validate data.

Balancing data management knowledge with a significant understanding of the human element to information technology, Barquin focuses on providing a suite of knowledge management and business intelligence solutions. “Our approach to business intelligence encapsulates both our work in data warehousing and knowledge management. With the combination of both, we are able to take our client’s data management to the next level, which helps them to develop an enterprise knowledge strategy that eventually becomes the key to their organizational success,” expresses Barquin.