Almost inevitably being a research firm, we see a lot of data—without being too glib about it, a factor of asking a lot of questions is that we get a lot of answers. One of our strengths I believe, is knowing how we can "cut" data in different ways to offer deeper insights. More obvious for example is to do comparisons by country, or company size; where things get really interesting is where we use the responses to one type of qualitative question, to compare the responses to another. These types of insight generally form the backbone of our research reports.

On occasion, something catches the eye, either because it is anomalous to the rest of the findings or otherwise unexpected. Anyone who has had the joy—or indeed frustration—of wading through reams of data trying to work out why a specific group responded to a question in a particular way will know what I'm talking about here. On the one side, there's the question of "why?" driving the analysis forward, but at the same time this is tempered by the question of "so what?"—that is, does it really matter, or is it just an analysis dead end? In part this is detective work, in part trying to map the findings onto an existing understanding, based on both past practical experience and previous research studies.

Every now and then something jumps out of one study, that stands little chance of delivering more insight than a statement of its existence. One example, indeed, the data point I have been carrying around with me for a while and which prompted me to write this post, came out of a study we conducted on behalf of Force 10 Networks earlier this year. Specifically, consider the following chart:

We asked the same question in both Europe and the US, and generally found the same three answers across industry sectors—that NAC, Voice and WLAN are driving organisations to review their network equipment. In the US service provider space however, distributed software applications rise from nowhere and sit at the top of the pack. This is as fascinating as it is frustrating, as we are always limited by bandwidth—there are only so many questions you can ask before the respondent will get bored. As this particular project concentrated on networking and not software applications, we didn't have the opportunity to ask certain questions that might have helped us determine why this was the case.

Without dwelling on this specific finding (but any insights welcome), this serves as an example of what drives us forward as an organisation. With every research project we continue to learn, to wonder and in some cases to wish we asked just one more question that might help us interpret any unexpected anomalies that may appear in the data. At times it can be a cruel game but there's always the next study!