Interactions - September/October 2010

behavior. Other more general and future-oriented projects (e.g., on the future of the workplace) also force us to gain an overview on a wide range of topics.

9. Aggregate knowledge within the team to ensure strong results.

Our team is our capital. We have taken care to gather a mix of disciplines in social sciences ( sociology, psychology, ethnography), and have been lucky enough over the past years to have little staff turnover. Team management has used various methods to foster knowledge building. People began to specialize by themes (e.g., television usage, instant messaging usage) and market segment (the residential observatory and the business observatory). We have also organized our project work in three levels: the field researcher, the project leader, and someone with the overview of all different projects. Finally, we strongly believe it is essential to conduct most of our field research ourselves, and not to outsource it. By delegating and outsourcing field research, we would have risked losing access to the depth of data, as well as the real feeling for the user.

10. Aggregate knowledge from
outside the team to gain fresh
insights. As mentioned earlier,
it is crucial to learn from oth-
ers within the company who
have different views about
users and customers (account
managers, field agents, etc.). We
are experimenting with a new
internal exchange platform to
meet such stakeholders (e.g.,
customer-insights lunch). We
also believe it is fundamental
to work with external partners.
We have therefore signed a first
partnership with a research
unit in a local university [ 4]
with expertise in anthropo-
technology. This enables us both
to have a foot in the academic
and industrial worlds, while
working on joint projects.

Conclusion

Building a User Observatory
has been a long journey.
Ethnography has revolutionized
our way of thinking about our
customers. We now have the
impression to have “the right
cards in our hands to play a win-
ning game.”
If you have a vision for your
department and/or your com-
pany, try to turn it into real-
ity, even if you don’t think you
already have all the knowledge
or financial means to achieve
it on your own. You may think
bigger than just improving a
process here or repairing another
there. Sow the seeds in the right
heads, in the right places, and
at the right time. Learn and
grow with your vision, as it can
become a reality you can only
imagine today.

tecting hands,” Daniel Ledermann, former research-program manager, who early on understood the importance of the user, and Walter Steinlin, former head of Swisscom R&D. A very special mention to Stefana Broadbent, my user research mentor. Finally, I want to pay tribute to our team, the Residential and Business User Observatories, starting with Petra Hutter, a.k.a. Mrs. LOTUS (LOngi Tudinal Study head), head of the Residential User Observatory who is supported by Caroline Hirt, Veronica Pagnamenta, Géraldine Bröker, Cora Pauli, Silvia Büchi, and Ursula Ulrich; and continuing with all the members of the Business User Observatory: Daniel Boos, Myriam Fournier, Laure Kloetzer, Sandra Moscatelli-Steiner, Thomas Robinson, Susanne Schlegel, and Samuel Tikou.

AbOut the AuthOr
Valérie Bauwens is head of
the Business User
Observatory of Swisscom’s
Research and Development
(R&D) department. The
[ 4] EDANA, anthropo-
technology laboratory,
University of Applied
Sciences, Neuchâtel,
Switzerland; www.
philippegeslin.com/

Acknowledgments Closing this article can be done only by thanking everyone who has made this adventure possible. First of all, I would like to pay tribute to Kilian Kämpfen, my manager who provided me with continuous and unconditional support, when I had only faint ideas of what I wanted to build. I would also like to thank two “pro-