Ethnography
Using the systematic observation and analysis of people in their natural environments to glean insights of strategic relevance or interest
To stay ahead in today's competitive, global marketplace, corporations have adopted different approaches for understanding their target customers or the human processes within their own organizations. But many of these approaches for understanding people – such as surveys, focus groups, market research, and organizational audits – reveal only part of the picture.
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| Ethnographically derived understanding of what people actually do (as opposed to just what they say they do) is critical for: |
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identifying strategic and commercially viable opportunities — while minimizing innovation risk; |
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developing significantly better products/services than competitors' — by more effectively understanding customer needs; |
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transforming customer relationships or enhancing organizational metrics — by building more collaborative relationships with customers, improving employee knowledge & productivity, and more. |
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Solution & Benefits
Ethnography provides a more complete, valid, and nuanced picture of what people do — their practices, habits, tacit knowledge, and the contexts in which they interact with various products/ services/ processes.
PARC pioneered the use of ethnography in technology companies, and continues to expand the scope of its methods and applications in diverse settings — with multiple clients in the U.S. and Japan. [More about PARC's approach and experience...]
PARC ethnographers have applied their diverse expertise to help clients:
- identify entirely new business or innovation opportunities;
- develop user-centered products/ services;
- enhance cross-organizational information sharing, knowledge management/ capture, and collaboration;
- improve the customer interface (web or over-the-counter order-taking, call-center interactions, other company transactions with customers);
- increase the effectiveness of employee learning programs;
- design more efficient workspaces;
- transfer observational skills, data-gathering tools, or other "ethnographic" capabilities;
- co-design new processes or programs;
- and much more.
Services
- ethnography for opportunity discovery & user-centered design — PARC ethnographers help identify new business and innovation opportunities; develop user-centered products/ services/ experiences; instantiate concepts or test prototypes with end-users; anticipate emerging trends; and more.
- ethnography for process/workscape transformation — PARC ethnographers help transform customer relationships and/or internal organizational dynamics; improve information-sharing across organizational boundaries; enable effective work practices across distributed project teams; enhance employee learning, skills, and organizational knowledge capture; redesign workspaces or tools; identify underlying or systemic problems and co-design strategies, processes, or programs for addressing them; improve company culture or change core values; and more.
- introductory workshops and apprenticeships — Through PARC's structured, customized, introductory workshops, employee teams from a single organization can "experience ethnography" and gain tangible knowledge about how it works, experiment with ethnographic techniques, and glean insights that are immediately relevant to your objectives. We also offer apprenticeship & certification programs where PARC transfers significant ethnographic capabilities to an organization.
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