Re: Suggestion. GNOME Feedback Form

[John Williams <john williams lists gmail com>]

On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 21:20 +0200, Quim Gil wrote:

> > 5. One last question - what will you do with the information?
This is the key issue, all else is mere technical details.

> I also want to know the answer.  :)  I'm confident that a good
> marketing team will find good questions and a strategy to deal with
> the information provided.
For those of you who do not know me, I teach marketing research (and
have previously taught marketing strategy) at a university.  I also have
consulted with "real world" clients about research and strategy.  I want
to give you some information about how similar projects I have been
involved with in the past have panned out.
 
Manager: We need to monitor satisfaction.

Analyst: Why?

Manager: Because, well, um, satisfaction is important, and everyone else
does it.

Analyst: OK, so what will you do with the information?

Manager: We'll feed it in to our strategy and planning process.

And then what happens is that if the info supports the existing
"strategy" it is endorsed and used, but if it conflicts with what people
want to do, it is questioned and dismissed.

I suppose what I am trying to say is that so-called "hard numbers" can
always be questioned if they conflict with people's goals.  At best they
are another plank in an essentially rhetorical (as opposed to logical)
argument. (If the goal is change of organisational behaviour.)

Let's do this, but let's not kid ourselves as to the value of the data.
I can see us putting it in press releases and feeding to journalists,
but not much else.

I am sorry to sound negative about this.  I want to see it happen, and
will help where I can.  I am a statistician, so I can write the code
that actually analyses the data if that would help.  I recommend R
(http://www.r-project.org) for this purpose.  It can read MySQL (and
other) databases, do the analysis and spit out HTML (or LaTeX) reports
with all the graphs etc.

I can also help design the questions, but would prefer the leave the
HTML and scripting code to the experts.  If no-one else steps up for
that part of it I will have a go, but you might not regard the resulting
code as top-notch ;-)

Cheers,

John