As the desire and need for research grows and scales, research becomes a part of your organization's DNA. At this stage in research enablement, the researchers who were once fighting “for a seat at the table” to do research at all will be enabling others to do it. Researchers who were once looking for allies now have research champions in all corners of the organization.
If researchers are no longer isolated in silos, neither should the output of their work. So as we think about how to scale influence and reach more people with research, we need to think about how to make research easily accessible to anyone who needs it.
As the desire and need for research grows and scales, research becomes a part of your organization's DNA. At this stage in research enablement, the researchers who were once fighting “for a seat at the table” to do research at all will be enabling others to do it. Researchers who were once looking for allies now have research champions in all corners of the organization.
If researchers are no longer isolated in silos, neither should the output of their work. So as we think about how to scale influence and reach more people with research, we need to think about how to make research easily accessible to anyone who needs it.
What is centralized research?
Centralized research is the practice of curating and managing all of the organization's data, information, knowledge, and insights into one place. This helps to ensure that people have access to the right information in order to answer questions quickly, such as:
- What do we already know about this topic?
- Have we interviewed this customer type before?
- How have our customers' needs and preferences changed?
- What competitive, foundational, or evaluative research exists?
- What data do we not have and need to collect?
- And more…
Centralized research makes it possible to collaborate
Collaboration is essential in the series of steps we’ve seen companies take towards research enablement. In the previous section of this guide we talked about inviting, including, and empowering others with the tools, processes, and support to do research.
We also provided some practical tips for how to collaborate, such as when to consider delegating research to non-researchers and when to reserve the job for a dedicated researcher.
With a continuous and collaborative research process in motion and as demand and speed scale, your organization will produce more research than ever. That output needs a new home. In this section, we’ll talk about how and why to expand your research enablement practice with a centralized research repository.
The threats of decentralized research: tunnel vision, distorted perspective, tribal knowledge, and unused insight.
Is bad or silent research worse than zero research? The verdict is out, but we say yes. Bad research is the output of poorly collected and analyzed data, which can be incredibly harmful.
Silent research is research that’s happening but unknown to anyone except the person or team conducting it. The output of silent research are findings that serve a moment in time and then discarded or left to collect dust on a shared drive.
Without a centralized research initiative, those armed with the baseline literacy to do research will go off and do it in order to move work forward. They’ll find their own research process, tools, and storage solutions.
Side effects of decentralized research can be significant and even dangerous over time:
- Tunnel vision: Inability to see anything other than what’s in front of you at this moment in time. This can lead to a lack of awareness and inability to see the greater context of research.
- Distorted perspective: Only creating solutions for a certain set of people that fit into a certain set of boxes. This research can inform poor solutions that simply don’t work for all necessary use cases.
- Tribal knowledge: Data living only within a group of people but unknown to those outside of it. This can lead to lost knowledge as people move on from the company.
- Re-learning: What we call an “oh-duh” insight: things we already know. The cost of duplicative research and re-learning is expensive.
- Unused insight: Insight that fails to be used or reach the rest of the organization. Opportunities to act on and innovate with those insights are limited.
By centralizing research from across the entire organization, we mitigate some of these major threats to the business, and also unlock some powerful advantages. Before diving into those advantages let’s review the key qualities of a centralized research hub.
What are the qualities of a centralized research repository?
A centralized research solution will look different for every organization depending on industry, size, goals, needs, and preferences. You may choose to use a repository specifically designed for research, customize a generic solution (wiki, intranet), or opt for the simplest implementation like a spreadsheet on a shared drive.
Although a dedicated repository is preferred, the specifics of what you choose isn’t as critical as the qualities of it, which should be:
- Accessible: Everyone in the organization knows where to go to find qualitative data, information, and insights.
- Secure: Personal identifiable information (PII) is either redacted or protected. Data requires company credentials to access.
- Contextual: Research insights and findings are presented with background, evidence, and context to reduce misinterpretation.
- Cumulative: Information and insights reference and build, creating compounding value over time.
- Up-to-date: The latest and greatest information about the research team, active and upcoming research, contact information and requests.
A thoughtful approach when implementing a centralized research solution will ensure you have something in place to mitigate the major pain and risks we outlined above. As your research practice grows and matures over time, it may become necessary to re-evaluate the solution.
Centralizing research across an entire organization is a big undertaking, because there’s a lot of data to comb through and it will all be documented differently. Some research will have plans, most won’t. Some research data might be analyzed, but most may be raw. Some research will be relevant, whereas some might be outdated. Start chipping away at centralizing research with the following initiatives:
- Map out the structure: Consider discoverability and how you’d like to organize your research. Some ideas are by customer persona, research type (discovery, evaluative, baseline), team, product, or experience. It’s helpful to do this before conducting your audit and stakeholder interviews so you can apply this lens to those activities.
- Perform a research audit: Investigate what data already exists with a research audit. Be prepared to find a wide range of quality and completeness. Create a criteria to evaluate what’s relevant and should be included. Get all research into a consistent format.
- Conduct stakeholder interviews: Extract and document tribal knowledge and insight from all corners of the organization by conducting a series of stakeholder interviews. Some important people to consider are long-tenured employees, executives, and customer-facing roles. You’ll walk away with a clear picture of what the org knows and more importantly, what you need to learn.
- Educate & socialize: Once you’ve centralized research into a repository, the work doesn’t stop there. You need to socialize your new repository and share how people should use it and integrate it into their workflow. Host lunch & learns, a workshop, and set office hours to improve adoption and success with your centralized research efforts.
Knowledge is just the tip of the iceberg: the bigger advantages of centralized research.
If collaboration is at the heart of a research-enabled organization, then centralized research makes this possible by ensuring data and insights are accessible and transparent to the people you’re collaborating with. It’s good practice for any organization to be well-organized, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Centralizing research unlocks some key advantages for any innovative organization on their journey towards research enablement.
Research moves upstream
Researchers are meant to shepherd us to the future. With more visibility on research, researchers get to move upstream and ask more emergent, strategic questions rather than staying busy downstream in an organization.
Instead of responding to the immediate needs of stakeholders, research can become a more proactive resource, shaping decisions before they emerge.
Research builds
More data doesn’t inherently lead to more knowledge. With centralized research, knowledge will scale with data and build over time. Teams can build on each others’ work to make more holistic and informed decisions. (Psst: We’ll dive into cumulative knowledge as its own dedicated chapter next.)
Research is always new
With an accurate representation of what we already know and what we’re actively learning, we can ensure we’re spending effort researching new things about our customers. Researchers have the imperative responsibility to explore the unknown, and this equips them with the knowledge to do it.
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Kick off your efforts to centralize research with Notably
Notably is a dedicated research platform to collect and analyze qualitative data, and share research insight within your organization.
If you're kicking off an initiative to centralize research with stakeholder interviews and a research audit, you can book some time with us for free to see how to get started. For enterprise customers, we even help with the process of data migration to make the experience of centralizing research and getting a repository up and running easier on you.
You can also jumpstart this process by signing up for free and evaluating Notably with a 7-day free trial of our Teams plan.
So far we've touched on how continuous and collaborative research introduces more frequency, volume, and contributors to insight generated within an organization. We’ve reviewed how to consolidate and organize that data into a repository like Notably. In the next section of the guide, we’ll share how cumulative research plays a key role in the success of Research Enablement.
Allison Grayce Marshall
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