MI Pro Research Studio 5 reviewed

There has been much soul-searching in the MR industry lately about the future of the classic research agency, with DIY tools encroaching and clients passing over research companies in favour of other data sources, for consulting companies and even forging direct relationships with fieldwork agencies. It’s rather astute of one well-established and pretty high-end research software provider to bring out a new web-based version of its software suite that puts collaboration centre stage. Potentially, this allows research agencies to forge closer links with other organisations up and down the supply chain – and in doing so, lets the research agency refocus its attention on its research expertise and become less preoccupied with process and fieldwork and more occupied with consulting and advising its clients. At least that is the theory.

Research Studio is a very versatile piece of research agency software in its own right, and there is no obligation to use it in this work-sharing way. It’s also a fact that other web-based software products permit some degree of collaboration. But MI Pro has put some extra thought into how research companies, research buyers and specialist research partners are likely to want to interact. For example, a number of different roles are provided – expert user for the project owner, consultant for the client.

Beyond this, you can define any role and make projects available across company boundaries to other companies that may have their own accounts and projects in their own right. You can also support colleagues or clients with a special ‘team view’ mode in which you can share your desktop and use real-time chat. You can also use this function to seek assistance from MI Pro tech support.

Sensibly, there is also complete version control and an audit trail – so you can allow clients to make changes, but then review those changes and roll back to a previous version if they’ve managed to screw up your survey in their enthusiasm. What it does lack, however, is any review and comment capabilties – it’s asking a lot to expect all clients to be going in and editing your survey.

For companies who do not have their own in-house scripting or DP (such as our featured user, Ipsos Norway), external DP specialists can be granted expert user access on a project-by-project basis, with these projects showing up in their own account alongside projects for other research company clients.

Despite acquisition by GMI a few years ago MI Pro is again in independent hands under the original management team, after GMI announced it was getting out of being a software providers. Since then, MI Pro has worked on a new web-enabed interface which extends to the design, web deployment and workflow modules.

They have made a wise choice in using Microsoft’s Silverlight platform, as opposed to the more popular .NET because, rather surprisingly for a Microsoft environment, Silverlight is completely cross-platform and cross-browser compliant. Research Studio 5 works equally well under Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, delivering a desktop app experience with full drag-and-drop capabilities even though the software is entirely web-based. You can also use it offline as a desktop application in its own right.

Silverlight has allowed them to create some neat features, like a PowerPoint-style slide-sorter view of questions to allow researchers to reorganise the order of questions in a survey by dragging and dropping.

There are plenty of web-based mixed-mode research platforms to choose from, but a few other things single this one out beyond the multi-agency work-sharing features already mentioned. For one, this supports all four major modes – Web, CATI, CAPI and paper, with OCR forms scanning via Documents for Forms. Another striking one is the workflow and process automation this offers. Many web-based tools work in a file-less way: you may export a data file eventually but, within the system, surveys, scripts, samples and data are all handled for you and appear as if by magic when required, because everything is held in a relational database.

Research Studio gives you a schematic workflow manager that lets you define steps or nodes through which DP activities can take place: merging files or splitting, applying weighting or performing coding. Coding is not automated but it can be done collaboratively, and you can define your own roles here too.

Neither is the really technical user destined to be frustrated with a cumbersome point-and-click interface when he or she wants to do some real heavy lifting. Usually just a right-click away from any function is access to all of the XML code that sits behind MI Pro, which can be edited or created in other tools externally.

Reporting is still, to some extent, a work in progress. MI Pro’s extraordinarily useful Superdig multivariate correlation tool has not yet made it over from Research Analyzer to its new Silverlight reporting module, called First Line, but it does make it really easy to pull off topline reports and a basic set of cross-tabs, and create graphics. As yet, this does not integrate with Excel or PowerPoint – but that is coming. Research Analyzer’s support for both is exemplary.

Research Studio 5 provides an appealing mix of flexibility and simplicity for the middle-sized research company – especially those who would like to do more for themselves, but not everything.