A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on this topic with the idea in mind that technology convergence - mainly feedback management and text analytics - would eventually change the way organizations manage their feedback by providing a single application where feedback of different types could reside. After doing some more reading (and thinking) on the subject, it seems to me that this convergence will take a long time to have any real organizational impacts. Mainly, because entrenched business functions within organizations don't easily change the way they do things.
A couple of my thoughts on how converged Enterprise Feedback Management and Text Analytics solutions will actually operate in the real world.
I suspect that for organizations that employ EFM today, text analytics will be an add-on capability with two main uses: To provide some automation for analyzing verbatims from surveys, and possibly, to provide a mechanism to merge at least some of their unstructured feedback with the structured feedback they get now. More importantly though, for EFM vendors facing increased competition from lower cost feedback management tools, text analytics will provide some "glue" to bind customer's more closely to them.
For organizations that mainly rely on unstructured feedback mechanisms today, convergence may mean easier access to, or possibly, more intelligent approaches to structured data gathering. Text analytics can help to create a structure for unstructured data. But, because its hard to control for respondent profile (ensuring the response isn't all from the "wrong" sets of people) in unstructured data streams, whatever structure and results come out of the unstructured data analysis will have to be validated by surveys, which provide more controlled sets of results.
In the end little real change is likely to occur in organizations from this technology convergence. But lots of expensive software should get sold along the way.
A couple of my thoughts on how converged Enterprise Feedback Management and Text Analytics solutions will actually operate in the real world.
I suspect that for organizations that employ EFM today, text analytics will be an add-on capability with two main uses: To provide some automation for analyzing verbatims from surveys, and possibly, to provide a mechanism to merge at least some of their unstructured feedback with the structured feedback they get now. More importantly though, for EFM vendors facing increased competition from lower cost feedback management tools, text analytics will provide some "glue" to bind customer's more closely to them.
For organizations that mainly rely on unstructured feedback mechanisms today, convergence may mean easier access to, or possibly, more intelligent approaches to structured data gathering. Text analytics can help to create a structure for unstructured data. But, because its hard to control for respondent profile (ensuring the response isn't all from the "wrong" sets of people) in unstructured data streams, whatever structure and results come out of the unstructured data analysis will have to be validated by surveys, which provide more controlled sets of results.
In the end little real change is likely to occur in organizations from this technology convergence. But lots of expensive software should get sold along the way.
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