CSR, Incorporated
Delivering Data-Driven Value through our IBM Partnership

Amid the full tilt of the digital transformation, the competition that enterprises face today continues to be fiercer than ever. At the end of the day, customer relationships are what that matter the most and keep the company at the vantage point of business success. Vouching for this adage is Ms. Cynthia Marsden, President and CEO of CSR, whose company believes in building and maintaining strategic relationships with its key partners and consultants, and investing in a relentless focus on delivering customer value in every project they undertake.

Having undergone a major transformation, CSR has gone from being a “people- and process-intensive” organization to a firm that leverages state-of-the-art IBM platforms to enable its customers to use the technology and solve large business problems and use cases.

With a proven track record of four decades in the business of analytics and data, CSR helps its customers in the healthcare, government, and legal industries in deriving data solutions, measurement science writing, and communications solutions. CSR’s unique strategy, the Insight Development Approach begins with assisting its customers in defining their problems, through a consultative approach. In their attempt to provide a solution, they keep their clients focused on their problem, avoiding the possibility of an order-taker relationship; this allows CSR and the client to be successful in a budget-constrained environment. One of the most common challenges, constrained agency budgets pose a difficulty and CSR effectively tackles the fund insufficiency conundrum by deploying fixed price, cloud based solutions, instead of staff augmentation.

Furthermore, the White House directives on reducing regulations and implementing budget cuts have forced the agencies to do more analyses and obtain greater efficiencies, affecting the process of decision making. CSR’s partnership with IBM bears fruit in this scenario, where they employ a suite of IBM Bluemix hosted platforms, open and comprehensive toolsets, such as IBM SPSS, and IBM Watson for everything from planning, data collection, data discovery, predictive analytics, and the building of custom applications. Ms. Marsden explains that—“The exigency of system modernization and consolidation continues to be an issue, so we resorted to using the cloud, enabling quick response of delivery development.” She believes that these trends provide numerous opportunities for CSR using its technical skills to provide services, in partnership with IBM.

The depth and power of the IBM technology portfolio support our talent and analytical capability and gives us a unique presence in the marketplace

For instance, CSR assisted in the development of a performance measurement system that met the requirements of the Government Performance and Results (GPRA) Modernization Act of 2010 and Office of management and budget (OMB) regulations on grants management performance and management issues. The system collects data from grantees; performs data cleaning, validation, and verification; prepares various publications and reports for TTA providers, the Congress, and OMB, using analysis reports created with IBM SPSS.

The IBM partnership helps CSR develop strategies, pilot programs, and orchestrate integration/interface with legacy systems. The synergy that CSR has with IBM is powerful due to the mutual benefits shared, which has made their partnership work well.

CSR is an employee owned company (ESOP) and its management maintains an excellent working relationship with its employees—that comprises researchers who hold Ph.D.’s and Master’s degrees in different areas of business. “The depth and power of the IBM technology portfolio support our human capital and analytical capability and gives us a unique presence in the marketplace in a time of disruption and opportunity,” adds Ms. Marsden.

With a core focus on the healthcare industry, CSR has plans to expand into the education, food and nutrition, and DoD markets as well. With regard to its product portfolio augmentation, CSR intends to add more of custom, integrated cloud-based solutions that address data collection and analytics and data visualization needs and support organizational transformation and system/process modernization.