Designing online surveys for business research

Hello, I'm Dr. Joseph Martelli, a Professor of Business at the University of Findlay in Findlay, Ohio. Previously, I served as a research scientist at the Industrial Technology Institute at the University of Michigan. I also have several years of management and consulting experience in the corporate world, and I've designed and conducted many surveys during my career.

Today, we're going to talk about business survey design. Much has changed over the years and many of the difficulties in conducting survey research in business has been eliminated or simplified, because of the simultaneous and rapidly emerging developments in the field of information technology, IT, and enterprise resource planning, ERP. Information technology focuses on how to make information systems operate efficiently, and just as important is about helping people work better throughout the organization. Without information technology, meaningful survey research design in an organization was difficult to perform.

Today, enterprise resource planning has become partly synonymous with how an organization manages day-to-day business activities across multiple functional areas, such as accounting, finance, procurement, marketing, human capital, and even customer relationship management, CRM. Enterprise resource planning systems digitally unite a multitude of business processes and enables the exchange of data between them. By collecting an organization's shared transactional data across multiple functions, ERP systems eliminate data duplication, ensure data integrity, and expedite data dissemination throughout the organization. You may ask yourself why you should care about all of this as it pertains to conducting business survey research? The answer is because to provide the organization with meaningful data, whether it's about employees and the internal environment of the organization, or its customers and the external environment of the organization, survey research can no longer be effectively done within a vertical silo or within a single functional structure of the organization, as it has traditionally been done. As we will discover the cross-functional and team-based approach, often including external vendor partners, is essential in order to ensure success of any business endeavor. No longer does anyone or even everyone within the vertical silo in an organization have all the knowledge and skills necessary to successfully and efficiently collect business intelligence to facilitate strategic, tactical, and operational business decision-making. One of the other presentations included in this HSTalk series, it states that we're now in the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0. Among other things, it's characterized by the increased importance of data analytics in decision-making. This fourth industrial revolution enables machine to machine interaction using data with more opportunities for businesses to add value through data science. If you're charged with the responsibility to provide your organization with business intelligence through customer satisfaction, or customer experience research, then stay tuned and follow through this presentation.