“Strategically Leading & Developing Solutions”

Cynthia Marsden, Chairman, President and CEO of CSR is the design and creative force behind the company’s products and services. She has been a pioneer of bringing leadership and large-scale transformational change, armed with a passion for business transformation and growth and building high performance teams, Cynthia is devising strategy development and implementation while creating a positive and dynamic workforce where people want to work and are committed to stay.

"CSR was started over 40 years ago to address the need to distill ever growing amount of random data into information."

CSR was started over 40 years ago to address the need to distill ever growing amount of random data into information. Given the fast pace of technology and the digital transformation they are still engaged in, the need to move volume into value in an instant is just as valid as it ever was – if not more so. With a proven track record of four decades in the business of analytics and data, CSR helps its customers in the healthcare, government and legal industries in deriving data solutions, measurement science writings and creating digital communication solutions. CSR’s unique strategy, the Insight Development Approach begins with assisting its customers in defining their problems, through a consultative approach. While finding a solution, they keep their clients focused on the problem avoiding the possibility of an order taker relationship; this allows both parties to be successful in a budget constrained environment. One of the most common challenges, the constrained agency budget fund insufficiency conundrum, CSR tackles effectively by deploying fixed price, cloud-based solutions, instead of staff augmentation.

Their focus as CSR is not so much on the individual technology but on the analysis and outgoing communications to constituencies. This has enabled them to be vendor agnostic so that they can recommend the best solution to solve a client’s problem and/or partner with other companies providing the analytics to their data tools. “We have people trained in all the major analytical tool suites and use a variety of them depending on the business case and need,” says Cynthia. “So many companies are technology providers in our market – it is the ability to provide the top subject matter expertise and analytics of the data that is our differentiator.”

In an instance, CSR has assisted in the development of a performance measurement system that met the requirements of the Government Performance and Results (GPRA) Modernization Act of 2010 and Office of management and budget (OMB) regulations on grants management performance and management issues. The system collects data from grantees; performs data cleaning, validation, and verification; prepares various publication and reports for grants providers, the Congress, and OMB, using analysis reported with statistical analysis software.

CSR has gone from being a people and process-intensive organization to a firm that leverages state-of-the art platforms and tools enabling their customers to solve large scale business problems and use cases more efficiently and effectively. With a core focus on the healthcare industry, CSR has plans to expand into education, food and nutrition, and DoD Health markets as well. With regard to its product portfolio augmentation, CSR intends to add more custom, integrated cloud-based solutions that address data collection and analytics and data visualization needs as well as support organizational transformation and system/process modernization.

Ever since, Cynthia came on board as President and CEO in Oct 2016, she has driven the focus of the company away from Government Contracting delivery model to one of a Management Consulting focus where their experts’ partner with clients to assist them more effectively in supporting their missions. “This focus has made the company flexible and agile so when the COVID-19 situation hit, it was very simple for all of us to transition to a work at home model keeping everyone safe and healthy. Our operating mechanisms, tools and technologies were already in place,” says Cynthia. “NIH and CDC are currently our clients so from a business perspective we are engaged in providing additional health analytics and reporting for the various agencies and departments we serve. The thirst for analytics continues to grow.” IE