'Technology is the backbone of everything'

INTERVIEW:The evolving need for information has seen Dun & Bradstreet grow over the last 170 years. It is to recruit 75 new staff for its Irish operation.

DUN & BRADSTREET, the 170-year old American business information company that counts Abraham Lincoln among its past employees, is to recruit 75 new staff at its Irish operation.

The positions, which include researchers, software developers, analysts and support staff, will bring the total number of employees at D&B’s base in Sandyford, Co Dublin, to 225.

But whereas the credit “clerks” employed by the Mercantile Agency, D&B’s 19th-century predecessor, used calligraphy and red sheepskin ledgers to track the performance of businesses, the 21st-century company uses software applications such as MyDNB.com and DNBi Pro.

For chief executive Sara Mathew, technology is “the backbone of everything” D&B does – it’s what allows it to collate credit-risk and other data on more than 200 million companies worldwide.

“We just don’t want to think of data alone, we want to think of data and software,” she says.

Her reign as chief executive, which began in January 2010, is about transforming D&B “from a traditional data company to a digital enterprise”.

Part of that transformation will now take place in Ireland. Operations that had previously been outsourced in locations including India and Scotland have now been insourced and will be conducted from D&B’s Sandyford building.

The application DNBi Pro, which Mathew describes as “the mothership, the big one”, was mainly based at its San Mateo site in Silicon Valley, but has now also been moved to Ireland, where the team will start to “innovate off that product”, she says.

The DNBi Pro software is marketed at small businesses for which bump-free cashflow is vital, but which don’t use credit reports.

“They ship and chase, which means you ship it, and then you chase it, as opposed to figuring out who should you sell to, so you can ensure to collect your money.”

Data is exploding exponentially, Mathew notes, forcing companies like D&B to rebuild their data supply chains. This also means embracing “the cloud” and, in 2012, D&B will add what it calls a “web service layer” so that its customers can access data through cloud-computing applications.

Mathew was born and raised in India, where she was educated by Irish Catholics. Marriage brought her to the US, where she was hired by Procter Gamble and completed an MBA by night.

After 18 years at PG, she joined D&B as chief financial officer in 2001.

Mathew cites a “highly engaged, very passionate” workforce at the Sandyford base, which contains a dedicated room for collaboration and brainstorming where the walls comprise giant whiteboards.

In total, four US presidents worked as “credit reporters” for the company, which dates back to the Mercantile Agency’s founding in New York in 1841 by the social reformer Lewis Tappan.

“There’s only a handful of companies in the US that old. It’s probably under 20 – 15 to 20 – that are that old,” says Mathew.

“Why? Because it’s Darwinian in corporate America. It’s survival of the fittest, eat or be eaten. In our space, the technology space, the speed of change is just mind-boggling.”