url: https://dovetailapp.com/blog/microsoft-hits-question-answer-matt-duignan/ people: [[Matt Duignan]] research_teams: [[Microsoft]] publishers: [[Dovetail]], [[Advancing Research]]
- HITS came to be because it involved a research leader in a position of enough vision, authority, and with enough budget to be able to make it happen. In our case, we had a pretty large centralized research team of about 50 researchers and additional research support on top of that. (View Highlight) ^rw280342607
- If you have teams who have a culture of not reading, it’s fundamentally hard to feel valued unless you can figure out how to change the culture which is notoriously challenging (View Highlight) ^rw280342940
- When talking about measuring the impact, we have pretty good analytics so we can see whether people are reading stuff or linking to pages. One of the big metrics we’re trying to drive is whether people are coming to the front page and running a search or coming to one of our topical product pages in HITS. (View Highlight) ^rw280343131
- What we’re trying to do is create a self-serve organic behavior in our stakeholders and we can measure that and look at that behavior changing over time. (View Highlight) ^rw280343141
- The other part is how can the platform integrate with the workflow and tools that your product teams are using. In terms of filing bugs or work items, how do you connect with those tools that they’re using and how can you use your research knowledge systems as a way to connect. (View Highlight) ^rw280343144
- The last part I’d add is - it helps if there is a leader in the organization who’s creating some pressure for people to either be consuming or linking to the research. If there’s a leader in the organization who says something around not wanting to see any proposals for new features without links to good research. Something as simple as that can create a habit where non-researchers are incentivized to show the research behind, or justify, why they’re making a decision (View Highlight) ^rw280343186
- The impact this can have is, all of a sudden your research knowledge management tool is an asset to them and solving a problem that they have (View Highlight) ^rw280343326
- we did create an entire system for peer-review of durable insights. For something to be branded durable, it would have to go through a company-wide peer-review process. For various reasons, we didn’t end up operationalizing that, but it is something we have tried in the past. (View Highlight) ^rw280344559
- The danger of opening up the knowledge base and democratizing it is that anyone can go in and find evidence to back their story. (View Highlight) ^rw280346205
- That kind of balances it out because the alternative that exists in most organizations is that people make certain claims and no one can go and check their references. So you’ve already got this confirmation bias problem or even worse, people just making statements about things without any kind of reference or link to evidence. Or when you do get a link, it’s some giant document, making it very hard for people to follow up and dig in. We’ve also done a lot of work to make sure that when people drill into a specific insight from within a piece of research we show the surrounding context. That is something that is missing from some ‘atomic’ systems and earlier versions of HITS. The value of a repository (View Highlight) ^rw280346323
- Where you’re asking anyone to do additional work, if people don’t see a payoff and aren’t bought in or aren’t rewarded for it, you will face real challenges. The perpetual thing that we’re looking at with HITS is how do we add value in the moment, because a lot of the value is deferred, that either you’ll get because you’re putting stuff into a repository for use at some point in the future (View Highlight) ^rw280346357
- This is at the heart of the challenge with even a simple repository where you just upload a document and have to type in the name of the document and include one or two tags. That’s cumbersome to some degree depending on the culture of the team you’re in. (View Highlight) ^rw280346410
- you allow for folksonomies as it relates to interpretation (View Highlight) ^rw280346738
- We have a set of structured entities in HITS like insights and recommendations, reports, collections, etc. (View Highlight) ^rw280347113
- We get some requests for folksonomies or lightweight / micro-tagging and I think we will do something like that at some point. We just haven’t got around to figuring out exactly how to execute on it and how to make sure it doesn’t compete with the more formal taxonomy that we have today. (View Highlight) ^rw280347223
- I wouldn’t suggest going through the experience of building a bespoke solution or internal repository unless you are very well resourced and very patient. Let’s say you’re in a research organization and you are thinking of self-funding and building something. I would look at just taking something off the shelf first or doing something more ad hoc, like using some of the knowledge management platforms that already exist. I wouldn’t go into the middle ground of building your platform unless you’re committed to it. At Microsoft, it’s been an incredible journey and has unlocked all sorts of things for us, but it is a substantial undertaking. (View Highlight) ^rw280348001