Infinity Info Systems: Technology Award

What the company does: Infinity Info Systems provides business analytics and customer relationship management solutions to help their clients improve productivity while increasing profits and reducing costs. Founded in 1987, the company is based in Manhattan and has 92 employees.

Best practice: Infinity Info Systems’ iAnalytics (Infinity Analytics) platform uses an interactive dashboard to display key performance indicators (KPIs) that businesses can use to measure results and predict trends, allowing them to grow with minimal costs.

The iAnalytics platform, launched over the last year and a half, is currently used by about 20 businesses, as well as Infinity Info Systems itself. It uses a plug-and-play approach and leverages a templatized platform, which works across all departments, from sales and marketing to customer service and accounts receivable, and employs a top-down approach, which allows it to identify patterns and trends within the business’s data and apply the findings to more specific departments. The tool is intuitive and easily customizable, meaning that it can be used by all employees to measure, analyze, and predict data specific to their needs.

“I think it’s critical for every organization of any size to have some type of analytical technology, because that technology allows you to communicate better internally and externally,” says Infinity Info Systems CEO and president Yacov Wrocherinsky. “We use iAnalytics as a management tool to track the day-to-day business, but we also encourage our industry groups or our practices to use it as a tool to monitor sales, process invoices, and find new opportunities. If you review every week or every day, and you identify a strategic area within the business that is profitable or not, having that insight allows you to make a change and you can affect the result of that month. If there is an issue, because you have the information, you can respond right away.”

Tips for implementing your own best practice: To make an analytics program work best for your business, you need to have your KPIs in place. In order to identify which KPIs are critical to your business, Wrocherinsky recommends testing several scenarios. “What would happen if you didn’t track a specific KPI data point for several weeks? How would that impact the information you are receiving, your performance as an organization or a specific project? This helps you identify which KPIs are critical to your business,” he says. “KPIs should be tailored to a specific audience. For example, the KPIs the management team of an organization tracks would be very different than what a sales manager, project manager, or a business analyst would track. You need to be able to provide the right visibility, at the right time, to the right audience, based on the business need they are trying to manage and solve.”

Wrocherinsky also recommends that everyone in the company be educated and up to date on the latest technologies available in your industry, both by attending seminars and building a company culture that embraces change and growth. “People need to look at technology as an investment, not as an expense,” he says. “Every business out there is changing all the time. The question is, what do you do with it?  Do you embrace it, or do you fight it? I think embracing change allows you to chart your own direction. It allows you to define your own future.”