Let's do it ourselves! …or?
posted by: Nick Roman on 2/12/2010
Tim Macer, independent advisor and specialist in the application of technology of market and opinion research, recently made a comment in his blog about the use of in-house developed survey software in MR companies.
For several years Tim ran the annual Confirmit Market Research Software Survey for us, interviewing Market Research executives worldwide about key issues and trends affecting technology.
We've always been surprised there're so many companies out there that rely on self-developed software. The numbers below are from the 2008 survey.
There may be some companies now realizing that they need to re-think this usage of resources, though. Those relying on self-developed software were more likely to consider replacing their software than those using packaged software.
The main reason for relying on self-developed software is that "the software on the market does not have the functionality we need".
It is a very costly decision to use internal resources on building or maintaining your own research software due to some identified gaps in packaged software. It seems that people get distracted by some key missing features, while completely forgetting to look at the risks and the total cost involved in relying on internally developed software. And, also they forget to look at the "positive gaps": All the added functionality and other improvements the packaged system would offer compared to the self-developed one.
Tim makes a very good point in his blog on how "Open systems now make it readily feasible to customize … a choice that is often neglected". Internal development resources could be spent on customization instead of building a system from the bottom-up, making it possible to utilize those resources better and achieve much more.
Openness has long been a clear strategy for Confirmit. To name some examples: we offer the ability to include custom HTML, client side scripts, and embed elements (for example Flash) on survey and report pages; we offer rich survey scripting with the ability to create your own Custom Code Libraries, full Web Services APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), and scripting in Reportal that enables the creation of sophisticated custom dashboards within the Reportal framework; and just recently we announced Confirmit Flex.
Confirmit Flex is aimed at providing a framework for us to use in our own development when we want to deliver certain applications and extensions to Confirmit quickly, outside the regular releases, and also as a framework for customers and partners to build their own custom applications and extensions to Confirmit.
The model is similar to Facebook apps, in that we, with proper authentication in place, provide certain extension points or "hooks" that an external application can connect to. One of the first examples of these hooks is the "Survey Engine API". The Survey Engine API delivers an XML or JSON representation of a survey page, which an Extension can use to present the page in an alternative rendering. The responses are posted back to the API. The survey engine will process it, and return the XML or JSON representation of the next page, and so on.
One example of this, which is available in Beta now, is the Confirmit iPhone survey extension, which, for a survey opened on an iPhone or iPod touch, will render the survey into a format that takes advantage of the iPhone experience, optimized for the touch screen. We've also prototyped an MSN Messenger survey interface and SMS surveys in the same way.
One of the interesting benefits of Confirmit Flex is that it can make it extremely fast to develop new functionality and try it out at a low cost and risk, allowing us, our clients, and our partners to do more innovation than we would risk investing in earlier.