Tariq Mirza Tariq is currently working as the Business Development Director for Intellex Dynamic Reporting, an online analysis and reporting SaaS company based in The Netherlands. His work involves driving sales and managing new accounts, formulating pricing structures and clarifying product offerings. He is also responsible for creating and driving strategic partnerships with independent 3rd party software suppliers. Read the full biography here.

RIP ppt?

(Or how we sleepwalked our way into giving the customer what we want)

9 March, 2010

Without wanting to make people’s eyes glaze over in a millisecond, I would like to focus on the issues surrounding the fact, that somehow as an industry we habitually use Microsoft PowerPoint as a default reporting and delivery tool without actually questioning if this is truly affording us the best way to communicate our research findings and add value for the end user.  Ultimately, the key question should be “how we can make research more effective for the research buyer?”

When I briefly left the MR Software business for the toy industry I saw the true value of research at the sharp end.  I also worked with the companies in China whose main business was making action figures primarily for the UK and US markets.  I saw, as a newcomer to the industry, that they were taking the easy route of buying a new license and then putting a new head; say the most recent Dr Who or a character from Twilight, on top of the old bodies of say, Spiderman or Lara Croft.  Sometimes they didn’t even bother to try and make the new heads look like the actors who played the characters.  They were blindly destroying the integrity of their own industry through short sightedness, lack of innovation and fresh ideas.

We are giving the end user what we know how to do, not what they need.

Obvious parallels can be drawn with the endemic use of, and over reliance on PPT within our industry. All we have to do is take our corporate PowerPoint template and slot in the new figures.  Added to this lack of imagination there is this almost blind assumption that a PPT is an acceptable form of delivering MR reports.  We are giving the end user what we know how to do, not what they need.

As with most things that we want to improve, the real value and the fundamental key to progress and innovation is in re-defining the question and not in just trying to fix the problem.  Instead of asking “should we be using this tool for the reporting and publishing of survey data?” we should be asking “how can we deliver in the most usable way the data and the analysis which we have collected and derived for the client?”

This emphasis on the data collection and database aspect of survey data by software suppliers combined with the move to put a copy of MS Office on every desk, led to the eventual over reliance on PowerPoint.

This is why PowerPoint is no longer effective.  PowerPoint reports are merely beautified and simplified static tables, sent in an electronic format, effective at first glance; however, when push comes to shove, they are not delivering the right information to the right people within the right time frame.

How did we end up with such a reliance on PowerPoint for our reporting and delivery?  Unfortunately, within the MR Software space, particularly within analysis, the amazing longevity of and technical loyalty to packages like Quantum, Merlin, Uncle (USA) and SurveyCraft (Oz), has in many ways stifled REAL progress.  These technologies are ingrained deep in the psyche of DP departments everywhere, and one of the main challenges now is to “think outside the tabs”.

It started back when batch paper tables produced from mainframes were the only true way to deliver survey data. Reports were produced as word documents and the clients were sent a lorry full of tabs cutting the data in as many ways as the researcher could anticipate the client would need.  As the technology progressed and with the introduction of PCs, DOS and then Windows, the software providers started to develop desktop analysis tools such as market leading Quanvert and SPSS in the early to  mid-90’s.  The first move away from batch tabs came via the packages like Harvard Graphics, and spreadsheets such as Lotus 123 and Excel, and then ultimately with PowerPoint.

The MR software suppliers were so busy with the myriad opportunities offered by the web that they focused their resources towards becoming the leader in web data collection software. This was followed subsequently with their obsession with building panel management software to facilitate the financially exciting move to online panels.

This emphasis on the data collection and database aspect of survey data by software suppliers combined with the move to put a copy of MS Office on every desk, led to the eventual over reliance on PowerPoint.

There were a few software suppliers who saw the opportunity of linking batch tabs to more jazzy viewers. The bolt-on tools to legacy technologies were eventually extended to take tables in to Excel and then PowerPoint.  However, these packages exist essentially to plug gaps created by the continued use of legacy technologies and the rise of Windows and the web. Unfortunately, they only botch fixed the problems as opposed to redefining the key questions.

Also, agencies and research buyers everywhere discovered the benefits of MS Office and specifically of PowerPoint and started to manually enter table data directly into Excel and then taking this information into PPT - a long painstaking process fraught with the possibility of making mistakes.  This gave researchers less and less reliance on DP departments and allowed more creativity and visualisation of data and information. These manual or semi-automated methods for moving data are hugely error prone and are still widely used.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, market research clients were being leant on by their internal stakeholders, empowered and emboldened by the computing and internet power they had on their desks, for online and real time reporting, portal areas and project specific dashboards which can cater for all aspects of analysis, reporting and delivery.

To start trying to redefine the question, we need to have a better understanding of research buyers and their internal challenges to communicate the key information at the right level to the right people.   The real challenge is not to understand only the buyer directly, but to really have a fundamental understanding of the management layers above this person that drive that need and requirement within the client organisation.  Who are the key stakeholders within this organisation? How much time do they have to understand information?  Do they best understand the information in the form of charts, graphics or tables? Will they even open and seriously read the PPT attachment if they are sent one? 

As researchers, no matter how fully briefed we are, we can never wholly anticipate all the information requirements of our clients.  Just as the executive will inevitably go back to DP looking for another cross tab or filter, so the client will inevitably require a completely different cut of the data after we think we have exhausted every combination.  Static deliverables will simply not suffice any more either internally or externally.  By all means let’s try and provide what we believe to be the crucial figures but let’s give them the ability to extrapolate on their own; try their own “what ifs”, take out their own outliers and run their own statistical test.  For this we need software which can rise to the challenge and ultimately deliver mixed mode delivery, a combination of PowerPoint reports, Online Tabulation, Online reports, Online Portal areas and Dashboards to make research delivery and reporting more effective.

In summary, it is clear that PowerPoint has had its day as the only meaningful and relevant way of delivering research findings. Research buyers demand more, and are increasingly sophisticated, web savvy and more hands-on than we give them credit for.   If agencies are using PowerPoint as their main delivery tool, then ultimately it can be argued that they are pouring lots of time, energy and training resource into producing something that will be read once and then filed away, almost into electronic drawers to gather electronic dust.

Today we are constantly pushing the boundaries and the media with which we collect market research data; surely we should not deliver this insight in last century’s format.  We need not only to use the right software but we need to collaborate with the end user and work in partnership with them on deliverables such as customer portals, dynamic dashboards and interactive tables.  Then we can deliver the full value of their data by making it fully flexible, fully engaging and a resource they can go back to and work with long after the project is delivered.

The real question is “How can we truly deliver research results in a manner that encourages research buyers to fully engage with Market Research and place it at the heart of key decision making processes?”

Tariq Mirza

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