On November 7th 2007 Information Evolution was formed. Ten years later, we have 300 employees in our three offices and we service dozens of customers worldwide. Our mission remains as it was then: to be a trusted data management partner for the firms building and maintaining the world’s most innovative online information services.
In some ways it remains as hard to explain what we do as it was in our early days, but here are a few examples of the things our work enabled in our first decade and the types of tools we used to handle the work:
- Giving account-based-marketers the ability to understand the precise professional priorities of their most important customers and prospects. (news monitoring, primary research, content creation, data analysis)
- Helping musicians get compensated when their work is used by others without their permission. (crowdsourcing, open source tools, complex process design)
- Allowing real estate professionals, engineers, and bankers to find every person or company that ever existed on a given piece of property. (OCR conversion, custom software, complex process design)
- Mapping geographic areas to enable the serving of geo-targeted mobile advertising. (open source GIS tools, crowdsourcing)
- Training chatbots to allow accurate 24/7/365 customer service for telecom customers. (crowdsourcing, custom software)
- Gathering data from images in order to add value to database records and allow complex search and retrieval. (data analysis, crowdsourcing)
- Harvesting government data and overlaying it on proprietary data to make b-to-b databases richer and more timely. (data extraction, process design)
While these diverse projects show the ‘magical’ promise of what information services can achieve, most of our day-to-day work revolves around the admittedly un-sexy heavy lifting involved in extracting, normalizing, confirming, and appending database records. Automated processes handle more and more of this work, but without the experienced data analysts, telephone researchers, interface designers, and process managers to manage our customers’ increasingly complex data supply chains, the work simply could not be done.
Other reasons why our company continues to grow are based on how we have decided to run our company.
- Commitment to our Customers’ Success: The company’s founding members remain very actively involved in all of our projects and we stand by our (reasonable) prices, (aggressive) delivery schedules, and (outstanding) data accuracy.
- Integrity: Not every service company has been built from the ground up by people with strong professional reputations and life-long commitments to customer success. IEI has.
- Innovation: We support innovation in the information service sector by donating to the University of Texas’s School of Information to support their innovative programs and brilliant students and we are aggressive early adopters of transformative technologies.
The technology and tools we use to make our customers’ commercial databases as valuable to their end users as they are may change but these principles will not.
So, what does the future hold for IEI? We’re not 100% sure, but we do know that those self-driving cars won’t just drive themselves and the algorithms that will make our personal and business lives better are based on underlying data that needs to be very, very accurate. However we do it, we will continue to define and refine industry best practices to make those mission-critical goals achievable and affordable.
Here’s to another ten years of helping our customers make the future a better place!