Researching IT use and views

First you need to know what you are trying to find out! In the first task this is how IT has affected an organisation. That's a bit wide, perhaps, so home in on some specifics: choose a department or small business which you can reasonably expect to get a sensible response to questions and choose one or more people to talk to.

Now you need to think of the questions. Before that, the sort of answers you'll need. These could be along the lines of:

The admin person says:
IT has made my job a lot simpler. I used to have to fill in forms for every new customer. The new system gets them to complete a on-line form and collects the data I need and I can access that whenever I need it.


But I still have to copy and paste it manually to another application to do charts for Marketing people.


I use Excel a lot for most of the data analysis and also to send out letters using Word's mail merge facility which can collect the data from the Excel database.


The problem with the charts is that they also need information from Sales about how much they've spend and that isn't on the same database so it's a drag doing them each month.

The Managing Director says
We replaced all the pcs for managers with laptops a year or so ago. Using the wireless network they can do their work almost anywhere on the premises and it's useful at meetings when they want to share what they've been working on.


It cost quite a bit but we got rid of loads of cables and can be much more flexible about accommodation - e.g. if I want to move someone's office it's dead simple now, well, apart from their plants.


There is a problem, though, as they take them home and some guys have some pretty sensitive data on the laptops. One idiot lost his when his car was broken into. We need to address that risk factor.

So to get those sorts of answers you might have asked:

How has IT changed how you work in the last year or two?


Can you give me an example?


What applications or equipment do you use that the changes apply to mostly?


Are there any problems associated with the changes?

Just these simple initial questions should get you some useful information and then you can focus on whatever they mention if you think you can get more - ideally an example of a really good improvement and what they used to have to do and, useful for a future task, some problems or disadvantages that have arisen.

The people you talk to don't need to have an in depth knowledge of their systems but they should, of course, know what they themselves are expected to do with data or how they need to use equipment regularly as part of their job or the business at large.

Look again at the types of departments businesses have and what applications they are likely to use a lot. That should help you guide people when asking questions so that you can get some information about changes that you can summarise and work with for your tasks.