InQuisient
Accelerating Data-Driven Decision-Making

If there is one thing that most IT and business leaders agree upon, it is that even after decades of implementing innovative data management solutions, silos remain intact in all too many organizations, impeding the free flow of data. This often leads to numerous issues and the biggest one of them all is slow decision-making. In today’s fast-paced business environment, decision-makers and managers need quick access to real-time data to make informed decisions and manage enterprise technology. This is where actionable enterprise architecture (EA) plays a key role. By gathering the required enterprise information and making it useable, actionable EA helps business leaders understand the context of the data, and how it can be used to improve flexibility and responsiveness as well as drive growth, innovation, and business strategy.

However, for a long time, many attempts at making EA actionable have failed, until InQuisient, a Virginia-based software and services company, came into the picture. Randy DeWoolfson, Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of InQuisient, says, “The EA of a company should represent the organization itself; it should offer a clear insight into what is really happening and not simply pretty pictures. In other words, it must be data-driven.” InQuisient’s patented technology is a Platform which includes an EA tool, a strategic planner tool, a portfolio management tool, an agile development tool, and a dynamic dashboard. By helping enterprises amass the complex corporate data matrix, these tools facilitate a smart and systematic flow of information. “Through our offerings, we take control of the wild data spread across an enterprise and allow decision-makers to connect the dots between the disparate data sets and place the EA in a prominent role so that organizations can benefit from it,” adds DeWoolfson.

The company’s EA tool—IQ Architect—not only provides a more precise and accurate view of an organization’s EA information but also lowers the total cost of ownership. Users can view business processes and edit them online. “Moreover, IQ Architect’s agile and flexible design enables managers at any level within an organization to tailor the tool as per their needs,” points out Scott Dixon Smith, CEO of InQuisient. Today, no other organization in the IT landscape takes the same approach to EA as InQuisient does, and that is what truly sets the company apart from the rest.

Better Data, Better Decisions

Since its inception in 2004, the firm has pioneered the data and truth-driven approach to EA management. “When we started the company 15 years ago, most organizations still largely employed complex EA tools that did not provide a clear and accurate view of critical data to design and manage their enterprise technologies,” remarks DeWoolfson. Aspiring to change this, he developed the IQ Platform—a user-driven, browser-based data management platform that not only presents users with complete transparency and visibility into data spread across their firm, but also organizes it to help make strategic decisions. With the IQ Platform, end users have access to high integrity, real-time information that aids them in making accurate and informed decisions at all operational levels. “I aimed to build a platform that was flexible enough to adapt to the data and data models that businesses were embracing to build their EA,” mentions DeWoolfson.

InQuisient’s IQ Platform, which at its core is a relational database, allows C-level executives and IT portfolio managers to import and export data, configure applications, and access all the critical information stored in it to make better business decisions.

Above the database layer is a web-based front end, which has built-in capabilities to understand the underlying meta-model of the database and automatically generate a clickable user interface. Both of these facets of the IQ Platform collectively help users rapidly create a system required to capture the specific information they are searching for and quickly gather it into valuable collaborative reports without the need for a customized IT solution. “It is this key aspect, which coupled with the Platform’s dynamic, robust, data-driven, quick to deploy and easy-to-use features, make InQuisient’s solutions distinct from other data management solutions,” remarks Smith.

The Game Changer

Currently, the company’s IQ Platform and other enterprise data management tools are successfully implemented and used by the U.S. Federal Government, Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community and multiple other enterprises across the globe. A recent instance that substantiates the company’s value proposition is their customer success story with a major federal department that was tasked with reporting, analyzing, strategically planning and managing their massive IT portfolio of projects that span across the globe. “The client found it extremely difficult to collect pre-existing data sources from multiple disparate databases and arrive at intelligent decisions,” states DeWoolfson. InQuisient initially modified the client’s enterprise architecture to include reporting and analysis. They also leveraged InQuisient’s innovative data collection and reporting platform to support a structured, online approach to managing both the strategic and execution plans. The client immediately experienced a dramatic decrease in costs to produce and maintain the vast amounts of data.

The Road to Innovation

In 2018 alone, the InQuisient technology, in a single deployment, tracked over 8,000 IT systems, performed over 20,000 assessments, managed 1000s of named users and had over six billion dollars in IT systems under management within the tool.

With the IQ Platform, end users have access to high integrity, real-time information that aids them in making accurate and informed decisions at all operational levels

For the journey forward, the company will continue to focus on expanding its portfolio of enterprise data management solutions to include a risk management framework and a resource management tool. In addition, InQuisient is planning on upgrading its current IQ Platform. With each enhancement to its Platform, through innovative design, InQuisient looks forward to helping its customers solve their data management, collection, and collaboration challenges. “We intend on continuing to grow, both internally and externally, driven by customer requirements, as well as continuing to develop and build long-lasting partnerships with our customers,” concludes Smith.