International Decision Strategies, Inc.

 

 

The IDS website is under reconstruction and should be available soon. In the interim, we hope you find the information below helpful. If you require immediate assistance or more information, feel free to contact us directly.

 

 

International Decision Strategies, Inc. (IDS), based in Alexandria, Virginia, is a service-dis­abled, veteran-owned small business. A communications and management consulting firm founded in 1997, IDS provides discreet services characterized by innovative thinking…the formulation of creative solutions to complex problems. By bringing multi-dimensional insights to problem solving, IDS guides domestic and international clients in successfully navigating challenges faced in today’s global environment.

 

IDS experts have responded to the needs of business, the U.S. and other governments, multilateral and bilateral donors, and not-for-profit organizations in the U.S. and more than two-dozen countries. IDS provides services in the following areas:

 

Communications

  • Focused, clear communications are central to achieving organizational objectives. They must be planned and managed with the same care as other aspects of a company’s operations. IDS services include: internal communications; public affairs and media relations; public education and social marketing; publication-program assessment and design; editorial and multimedia services and message testing and evaluation.

 

  • Meetings and conferences provide a one-time opportunity—even when conducted annually or more often—for sponsors to share knowledge and engage others. Well-run events send participants home smiling; troubled events send them home with tales of woe that are told and retold. IDS professional meeting planners provide clients with both turn-key and comprehensive planning and management services for pre-, onsite and post-event activities, including participating in planning meetings; conducting site selection and negotiation; developing coordinated promotional, registration and event materials; coordinating speaker and faculty travel and other needs; managing and monitoring registration and onsite activities such as facility and audio visual equipment setup, message centers and traffic flow between sessions; coordinating participant continuing-education credits and processing vendor invoices and speaker reimbursements and honoraria. 

 

  • IDS assists clients in designing and implementing communications strategies to reach domestic and international audiences. IDS can source professional, experienced translators in some 45 languages, whether it be for advertising, technical documents, public relations materials, human-resources documents, company signage such as work and safety rules and employee handbooks. IDS also can advise clients on and provide in-house workforce-diversity training, including sensitivity training for managers and officers.

 

Organizational Development

IDS provides organizational and management assessment, including company and project operational effectiveness, utilizing the control-self assessment methodology (CSA) pioneered by PDK Control Consulting International, LTD, Calgary, Canada.  CSA enlists employees in changing their organization—change is driven from within rather than being imposed from outside. Management learns what is working and what is not, and why. The CSA approach is based on the understanding that in management, people are the most important determinant of success—they can make a poor process work and a good process fail. With CSA, IDS helps organizations achieve their potential by enlisting management and employees in a collaborative process that maximizes the contribution of each.

 

Project Management

IDS has extensive experience in organizing and managing resources to produce desired results within budget and on time. Its project management experts, working with the client and the project team, identify the tasks necessary to achieve project goals and estimate the time needed to accomplish each. The result is an implementation plan, with indicators, that managers use to measure and evaluate progress. For IDS, quality control and client satisfaction are priorities. As part of the implementation plan, IDS designs a communications strategy to keep the client and team members fully informed. Through regular meetings of the project team, potential obstacles to achievement of goals are identified and addressed before they become major impediments. On project completion, IDS prepares a final report that details what has been achieved and recommendations, based on lessons learned, to guide the client in future program design.

 

Federal Agency Contract Compliance

For more than a decade, IDS has provided services to U.S. federal agencies domestically and internationally. Because of its extensive experience designing, implementing, monitoring and reporting on agency contracts and grants, as an awardee and as an advisor and subcontractor to other organizations, it is intimately familiar with federal contract administration and reporting requirements. Capitalizing on this experience, IDS provides a full range of services for clients with contract-compliance issues, in need of accounting support that complies with federal-agency requirements or faced with responding to federal-agency audit exceptions.

 

Democratic Development

IDS’s roots are in international development. It has provided technical assistance to organizations working with the U.S. Department of Defense and program design and implementation for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives in countries embroiled in conflict and political transformation. In emerging democracies, IDS works at the national-policy and grass-roots levels on a wide range of projects, including: civil affairs, indigenous-organization capacity building, conflict resolution, program monitoring and evaluation, anticorruption and human rights.

 

Selected Clients

·        AFL-CIO

·        American Center for International Labor Solidarity

·        Black, Kelly, Scruggs & Healey

·        Burson-Marsteller

·        Calvert Social Investment Fund

·        Casals & Associates, Inc.

·        Center For A Free Cuba

·        Chevron Corporation

·        Government of Equatorial Guinea

·        Iraq Memory Foundation

·        Iraq National Congress

·        Mobil Corporation

·        Senior Service America

·        U.S. Agency for International Development/Office of Transition Initiatives

·        U.S.-Cuba Business Council

·        U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

·        United Nations Development Programme

·        The World Bank

 

For more information, please contact:

 

Joseph Balcer

President

jb@ids-us.com

 

(703) 739-4224   FAX (703) 739-4232

911 Duke St.

Alexandria, VA 22314-3619 USA