NOP World conducts primary custom and syndicated research for marketers, advertising agencies and media on a worldwide basis. Its principal brands include NOP Research Group, Allison-Fisher International, Market Measures Interactive, Mediamark Research Inc, RoperASW, Strategic Marketing Corporation and recently acquired Cozint. In the US, NOP World has been rated the second fastest growing market research company over the past five years.
Today's international research buyer is demanding more consistent, comparable results from research carried out across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries from organizations like NOP World. At the same time, there is intense pressure to reduce the time required to deliver these results and to reduce cost, while increasing the value of the research through more insightful analysis and presentation.
Global consolidation within the NOP World group, through the acquisition of a number of established research agencies, had inevitably resulted in a diverse range of technologies in different offices. Much of the enlarged group's potential remained untapped due to the problems of moving work from one system to another. Furthermore, NOP needed to be able to develop new and unique products to offer to its clients, based on the latest technology, and to do this quickly and cost-effectively.
NOP World decided to adopt mrInterview and the Dimensions Data Model as the standard technology platform for its Web research activities worldwide. The open interfaces and the Dimensions Development Library associated with the Data Model are being harnessed to provide a rapid development environment for NOP World's Developing Technologies team to produce a series of customized technologies.
It was no automatic decision for NOP World to select mrInterview as the standard technology platform for its online data collection. A key deciding factor in its choice was the robustness and integrity of the Dimensions Data Model which underlies mrInterview. The open and industry-standard architecture of the Data Model enables NOP's software developers to create customized applications to run on the Data Model and integrate seamlessly with mrInterview.
As the NOP World group had expanded through acquisition into a global force in research, the company found it had inevitably inherited an eclectic mix of software, and more importantly for a research organization, an extensive legacy of valuable research data in many different proprietary formats. The diversity of tools and data formats in local use was a significant barrier to the company being able to capitalize on its global assets or enjoy economies of scale.
Realizing the potential of this data was going to take time and effort, unless a new generation of tools could be forged that would unlock the data without needing to reformat and reprocess it. NOP World set up a task force to evaluate the latest, best of breed, Web-enabled technology available today. While many of the solutions looked good on the surface, David Zotter, head of developing technologies at NOP World, was equally concerned with what was going on underneath. So much so, that he engaged a firm of technical auditors to dissect the technology and lay bare the underlying architecture of each competing system.
David particularly wanted the technical assessment to consider the openness of varying systems because if the chosen solution was not open enough, any software he developed would require more effort, to create and could not benefit from sharing data or resources with the main applications.
David Zotter explained: "After extensively reviewing the Web data collection software available in the marketplace we came to the view that the SPSS software most effectively matched our requirements. Generally, systems are not open, especially in the ASP (application service provider) world. You cannot get directly to the database. Many give the impression of being open but the reality is different."
Since adopting the Data Model and its associated Development Library of software components for research applications, a small team of just five developers at NOP World has been able to deliver a series of high quality, Web-enabled applications to an ambitious schedule of a major new product every three months. Being unique to NOP, the products are allowing it to win business on the strength of its innovative approach, while reducing the internal cost of providing its services on a global basis.
Prior to joining NOP World, David had been involved in the development of Web-based research applications for several other companies. He explained: "The things built at other companies took three or four times longer and were ultimately not as successful. At NOP, we are really moving fast. We've been taking three to four months to bring each project to market."
The first three products released include: a company-wide panel management system, a fully customizable tool for building online respondent communities associated with particular themed panels or surveys and a multiple data source Web-reporting tool.
"We have a really big need for clients to be able to cross tab between surveys," said David Zotter. "Using this, we can do trending and tracking studies. It is all Web-based and is pretty much all centered around the Dimensions Data Model."
The panel management tool provides any researcher at any of NOP's offices with secure Web-browser access to a new company-wide sample resource, not just for Web surveys but for more traditional CATI or mail surveys too.
"One of the biggest design factors was that there should be no duplicates," said David. "A lot of panels are like giant silos. It means people can be members of three or four panels and they could get used three or four times. We have one record per person so we can get a consistent view of each person."
The panel is also easily extended as more respondent information is collected, without any need to unload or restructure it, again thanks to the Data Model. And when NOP needed to add a level of security in order to restrict access to the different panels to their respective owners, the Data Model revealed another advantage.
"Each company can only see their individual responses associated with their panels," David explained. "We would have had to build all this ourselves had we not been using the Data Model." This is because the programmers could add this to the metadata layer of the Data Model—the part that is designed to deal with definitions—rather than program it in from scratch. It is something that saved weeks if not months of work and which traditionally would be a maintenance liability in the future.
Already, the new software, through the Data Model, is providing NOP users across the globe, with the shared tools and resources that the company needed to achieve greater economies of scale. Longer term, David is confident the Data Model will continue to offer advantages when it comes to extending and updating the programs and the data behind them. It is key to NOP World's strategy to integrate marketing research processes with corporate CRM initiatives, with all the complexity of dealing with massive databases and data warehouses.
As David Zotter stated: "Our goal is to ensure our internal people spend less time manipulating the data into a form they can use and more time actually interpreting and using the results. The Dimensions Data Model is allowing us to give them the tools to achieve that goal. It is definitely doing what we wanted it to. There hasn't been anything that we wanted the Data Model to do that it has not done."
Our goal is to ensure our internal people spend less time manipulating the data into a form they can use and more time actually interpreting and using the results. The Dimensions Data Model is allowing us to give them the tools to achieve that goal. It is definitely doing what we wanted it to. There hasn't been anything that we wanted the Data Model to do that it has not done.
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