Author: Daniel Wright

When faced with the critical task of making policy or departmental decisions based on citizen or employee feedback, the default for many government agencies has been to call in the consultants. For decades, the path of least resistance has led to outsourcing the entire process – from data collection to analysis – to external professional services firms. This long-established habit, however, is becoming increasingly outdated, expensive, and inefficient. It’s a behaviour born from a different era, when the technology required to deeply understand qualitative feedback simply wasn’t mature enough. The traditional thinking was that only large-scale, people-powered projects could deliver…