Welcome to the first Customer Insights blog by Aberdeen Group

In this, Aberdeen Group's inaugural blog posting on Computing's website, I'd like to highlight our approach to research and explain how we can help you with many of the day-to-day challenges you face in your job.

Our research analysts conduct third-party, primary research that allows businesses to benchmark their performance, strategies, processes and technology adoption against their peers.

Every month, we survey thousands of cross-functional executives from organisations around the world in 14 functional areas – from supply chain to finance, sales, IT and even HR:

Business intelligence

Communications

Customer management

Enterprise applications

Financial management and GRC

Global supply management

Human capital management

IT infrastructure

IT security

Manufacturing

Product innovation and engineering
Retail and banking

Service management

Supply chain management

Everything Aberdeen publishes is based on data collected from end users. Each survey collects two main sets of data:

1. Pace – We ask questions to understand what business issues keep executives and managers awake at night, and what they are doing to address those issues. We ask what pressures they face around a particular topic such as business intelligence, what strategic actions they are executing to deal with those pressures, what internal capabilities their organisation has, or is developing, in order to execute against those strategies, and what enablers (ie, software or hardware technologies) they are using, or plan to use, to automate those processes and gain greater efficiencies and productivity.

2. Performance metrics – These can be quite wide ranging, depending on the research topic, but can include high-level business metrics such as employee turnover rates, customer satisfaction rates and profitability, through to more IT-focused measures such as adoption rates of mobile devices, or how long it takes on average to add a new data source to a data warehouse.

Once we collect this data, we use the weighed aggregate of a number of those performance metrics to separate the top-performing companies from the rest. More specifically, we segment all survey respondents into one of three maturity classes: Best in Class (the top-performing 20%); Laggards (the bottom-performing 30%); and Industry Average (the middle 50%).

Once we have that three-way split in place, we overlay the data we've collected on pressures, strategies, capabilities and enablers on top of that. This lets us identify what the Best in Class do differently in order to achieve superior performance. From there we make specific recommendations to help all organisations improve their performance.

Our research analysts are excited to share their findings with you through this blog. I believe you will find their data-driven insights valuable from both professional development and business transformation perspectives. If you have any questions or would like to become a part of our global survey community, please contact me at [email protected]

Kevin Martin, senior vice president of research operations, Aberdeen Group