meaning: The Macer View/1

	The Macer View
	Comment and analysis from Tim Macer Number 1, April 2003

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The Macer View

Is the software industry facing up to MR's chewy data issues?

For all that has been said and written about MR and CRM, from polemics on agencies failing to respond to ‘the challenge’ through scare stories of CRM integrators tugging the rug from under our feet, to occasional glimpses of how smart thinking and clever technology can plug MR directly into the corporate gyroscope, there remains a technical and intellectual disconnect that actually goes well beyond CRM. A large part of the problem is in the fundamental ‘otherness’ of MR data, which makes it a square peg to the round holes of today’s corporate data warehouses and knowledge management systems.

The situation is bad enough with quantitative data. MR data is rather short on clean, simple numeric data. It causes huge problems when you try to apply common relational database report tools like Business Objects or Cognos. Nor does MR data fit easily into Excel or Access, despite everyone’s efforts. It gets worse when you consider the ultimate in unstructured data - those from qualitative research.

The pity is that, over the years, the industry and many of its software suppliers have retreated into a kind of technological shell. It forms a barrier at the point you try to move outside the union of CATI-CAPI-CAWI and cross-tab software. It is there as you try to draw sample from a CRM system in anything but the crudest way. The commonest way to get sample out of an enterprise RDB into a web or CATI survey today is the Excel spreadsheet - a triumph of low-tech expediency masquerading as integration.

It does not get any better at the other end. Emailed PowerPoints, Excel and Word documents are often the only potential for electronic delivery of data.

It is rare to find the facility in any cross-tab tools to merge in either raw data or aggregated data from other sources to lay on the same table or chart. Yet technically, it is not hard to do.

Fortunately, there are some innovative suppliers that take a more integrationist view: Centurion’s MaRSC database sampling system stands out as does E-tabs with its newly announced integration with Research Reporter for e-libraries of research. The difficult challenge is to make the fruits of research as pervasive and as readily available as the internal telephone directory. Integration with Microsoft Office must not be the only integration offered. In a right-handed contest, we must remember the advantage the left-handed tennis player has to dazzle and succeed, and use our knowledge and expertise to win at their game.

Tim Macer is MD of meaning ltd. www.meaning.uk.com