Strategic Research

Meaningful, contextual, emergent

It's a complex environment. Always changing, and always changing faster. How will you allocate limited resources for competing multi-year initiatives? How do you determine which projects to shut down, and in which projects to re-invest? How do you get people onto the same team after a controversial decision?

A strategic action research project will illuminate the animating patterns and make sense of how to work with them or change them. Discover more about the relationships, experiences, values, preferences, and motivations of your organization's stakeholders, and determine how to act on this knowledge. These research projects don't produce reports, they produce results.

Strategic research case studies

  • Learning things you didn't ask
    A project for the VP Development at an Ivy League college studied digital communication experiences and preferences of the top donor pool near the beginning of a $1.3 billion capital campaign. The work integrated a communications audit to quantify the outbound messages, pre-hypothesis qualitative research to understand the stakeholder experience of these communications, and technology infrastructure planning to support the Campaign's multi-year online stewardship effort. We identified and promulgated the idea of "alumni attention minutes" as a critical metric to drive decentralized staff toward campaign's based on the stakeholder's attention to Dartmouth. Several additional technology and communication projects followed.
    Generate powerful, actionable insights with pre-hypothesis narrative research
  • Reframing a consortium's online collaborative
    A project for a multi-stakeholder consortium of industry, government, and academic computer security experts conducted a deep-dive requirements analysis of an online information portal. Following an expensive failed effort by a much-larger vendor, our research uncovered areas of significant stakeholder concern about the fundamental premise of the project. Based on this dialogue and an in-depth understanding of collaborative technology, we redefined the project and the portal was re-conceived as a specialized knowledge-base repository and curated news service. This strategic transformation reduced the time-to-market, improved stakeholder confidence in the effort, and increased the probability of success. At the conclusion a follow-on project was contracted to provide interim technical leadership and product development mentoring for the engineer leading the development effort. Eventually this effort was merged with the Homeland Security Digital Library operated by the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security.
    Increase product relevance and reduce time-to-market simultaneously
  • Aligning internal constraints
    A project for an engineering-driven leader in computational fluid dynamics software conducted an extensive internal requirements analysis for a Unix-based customer relationship management application. Internal interviews drove a consensus scope, vendor evaluation narrowed the field, and a strategic deployment roadmap identified keys to rollout success. The system selected operated during many years of rapid growth which included several corporate acquisitions.
    Use technology requirements analysis as a doorway to organizational change

"Thank you for playing a key role in the creation of the I3P Knowledge Base. I have relied on you as a trusted colleague, it is not often in the academic world that a former consultant is asked to participate on a search committee. It is in recognition of the high value I place in your opinion and good sense that you were included. We have built a solid fondation for an information service due in large part through your guidance." —Patricia A. Erwin, Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P)

To learn more contact Michael J. Yacavone by email or telephone +1-802-526-2203.