Name: Navin Kumar Sinha
CEO, Double Check Consulting
Interview Conducted By:
Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor
CEO/CFO Magazine
CEO/CFO: Mr. Sinha, what is the idea behind Double Check Consulting Services?
Mr. Sinha: The idea behind Double Check Consulting is to provide quality services. For example, in off-shore mostly you have low cost, and 42% of the CIOs are looking for a low cost service. However, going forward value creation will be the more important thing. Things like research & development products will also be going to off-shore. Therefore, we want to provide a service that really matters. In America we work with people who are in college, so we bring them in early and show them how things are done. The idea is to give them practical experiences as soon as possible.
CEO/CFO: What is your approach to big data analytics?
Mr. Sinha: That is an interesting question. With regard to our approach to big data, we have found that in healthcare, big data is difficult because you do not have patient identification numbers, and you have a great number of duplicates. Therefore, the first approach is can you do it, and do it to the extent that your errors are minimized. The approach is not to take all of the data and then start putting some algorithm on it, so we work to come up with the best method. Our approach is not just machine learning, or a supervised or unsupervised method that you hear about on all of the social media. We have a rainbow approach, where sometimes we use a six sigma manufacturing approach, and sometimes we take machine learning. It is kind of wide because we do not know what will work, because the data has a great deal of variety, which is very hard to clean. Therefore, we have to sample a great deal of data and then do some hard work on cleaning to find information that the client never knew existed. That is what we strive for.
CEO/CFO: How are you able to provide easy to use techniques, which is part of your mission statement? What is involved in not only showing the results but making it easy for someone to get the results and to look at it?
Mr. Sinha: Algorithms can do what we want them to do. A big part of big data analytics is communication, so when we engage clients. We go into what we call, “Proof of Relationship”, meaning we have to establish some kind of relationship there. Before we take a big project we do a small project that we last for only a month or two months, where we will get some data, analyze it and present the data. It is more about communication, to find out how they want the results to be provided, what they are looking for, and what they do not like to look at. For example, they say, “I do not want to see mathematics, my business just needs to make money or save money”. Then there are some people who if we apply neural network, they will want us to show them what we did, because they not want a black box, and not trust it. What we do is take that Neural Network and work in such a way that clients will know as much as we can. It is about communication, transparency and value. If the value is there, clients will act on the results given the transparency.
CEO/CFO: Are you working primarily in healthcare today or are you in a range of industries?
Mr. Sinha: We are doing healthcare today, but we are a big data company, which could be from anywhere. We can work in multiple industries, how they come together and how they help people.
CEO/CFO: There are so many companies in big data, so how do you gain attention?
Mr. Sinha: We worked on LinkedIn. We go to local meet-ups. In past, we did not do too much outside of in Silicon Valley, California but, now we’re exploring more out of state. We also go to conferences. Silicon Valley is much like New York, because if you have something going on in big data, many people will show up. These are some of the ways we will get the word out.
CEO/CFO: Would you walk us through a typical engagement? What point in time a company might turn to you? What may they ask you to do and how do you achieve results?
Mr. Sinha: For example, I meet someone in a conference. The first thing I try to discover is the pain point, and then see if we can find the right talent for that, because everyone puts on their resume that they are data scientists, but they are doing just general data programming. We will show them some of the solutions that we have and certain use cases. Then find out how they would act upon the data results, because if they will not act upon the results the barriers will still be there. Then we will go into a larger project and see what the challenges are and what the data is. We will look to see what algorithms we can apply to the data and try to get them information that they did not already know. If we do not have novelty we will go back and see what more data we can get. We are always communicating with the client and trying to find information that they will act upon.
CEO/CFO: What has surprised you as the company has grown and evolved?
Mr. Sinha: If you believe you have a reason to exist, you will make the sacrifices, but if you are just here to make money, after a year or two you will quit and go look for a regular job. Getting information and results that you can share with a client takes a great deal of work.
CEO/CFO: Put it together for our readers. Why choose Double Check Consulting Services?
Mr. Sinha: Today there is so much data, but finding value is very difficult. Therefore, the number one thing is the time-to-value. The value is not what you find, but how fast you can find it. Number two is the effort. We make an effort to make it as simple as possible and we try to make sure the clients understand as much as we do. The data is a piece of communication. You may apply an algorithm and get results, but if you cannot communicate or change the operations or methods for the client it is useless. For those reasons you should consider Double Check Consulting Services. We offer transparency and present the data in a way they can understand.