Celebrating MIT’s 150th Anniversary: Alumni Ian Clemens, Founder Of IDV Solutions (Part 2)

Sramana: Did you begin doing data visualization work within the scope of your consulting work?

Ian Clemens: Yes. I was consulting, but I kept wondering what the best way to deliver the results of the consulting would be. Traditionally that is done through charts and reports. I really became interested in how to better deliver data. Visualization is natural. I am a big fan of Edward Tufte and his visualization books.

More than just visualizing the data, I was intrigued about methods to make the visualization interactive. With a traditional report as soon as you read the information something is out of date. It also prohibitive of ‘what if’ questions because the report is a piece of paper or a PDF. They are not living and you cannot interact with them. I was intrigued by interactive data visualization, which is what the IDV of my present company stands for.

We were doing some pretty novel things back then with visualizing data and getting the results back to our customers. We also saw that it delivered a good effect. Our clients were very pleased with what we were doing.

Sramana: Your consulting clientele essentially gave you a customer base to expose the results of your data visualization work to.

Ian Clemens: That is a very good point. We had a lot of different companies from Fortune 500 companies to local and state governments. It was also helpful to win the public over because we could visually show them what would happen as a result of various policy implementations.

Sramana: How did that work? Were you consulting for public projects for government officials and you would present results at a town hall meeting?

Ian Clemens: Yes, we did that very often. Our visuals would be used for lobbying for or against a policy. We used mathematical modeling with MatLab and various visualization tools.

Sramana: How much revenue would a project like that bring in?

Ian Clemens: We had projects that ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, but not much larger than that.

Sramana: How many clients did you have in that phase, and how many people were working to deliver for those clients?

Ian Clemens: Based on some of the initial successes, I was allowed to grow a small team of five people. In terms of clients, we had 20 to 50 different customers over the four years I was with that firm. What was novel was that not only were we doing the visualization, but I started building a development team where we could develop visualizations on our own and build them programmatically.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Celebrating MIT's 150th Anniversary: Alumni Ian Clemens, Founder Of IDV Solutions
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