Critical Success Factors: Six Things to Consider from the Field

aka: how to operate in an increasingly competitive global landscape

Whether you provide field data collection services, content, or technology, or need the services, data or products of those companies, these six factors of success are worth considering as you move forward.

First, some context might be helpful here. When I founded Spatial Networks in 2000, no smartphone market existed that we would recognize today. No iPhones, no Androids, no tablets, no cameras in phones (say that bit out loud and try to recall or imagine), no 5G, 4G or even 3G, WiFi was only three years old, Blackberry was less than a year old and the Compaq iPAQ was launched a month before I founded the company. This means there was no Uber, Twitter, Doordash, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, “crowdsourcing” wasn’t a thing, neither was Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, Mapbox, and we were all still mesmerized by the 1m panchromatic resolution of the first commercially available imagery from the IKONOS satellite. Arguably, more than twenty years later, the technology, industrial base and content availability have undergone 40x (exponential) evolutions.

Ok, but so what?

The point here is that these six things began to form as early as that first year of business as I was forced to sort out how to accomplish some very real, very challenging business intelligence data collection requirements in a number of countries and somehow earn enough profit to remain in business another year. I didn’t have many of the technological resources that are so easily taken for granted today, but in my 25+ years of working & managing data collection projects in over 50 countries, these six considerations have matured and consistently been proven true, elevating them as critical success factors that must be considered.

One of the many colorful doors in Tunis, Tunisia. copyright 2021, author

1. Point of Interest — what, precisely, are you interested in collecting. For example, fast-food restaurants, warehouses, educational facilities, mobile phone stores, hospitals, industrial or manufacturing facilities. As a customer, it’s incumbent on your team to really do the work here and be clear in articulating what you want, and just as importantly, what you don’t want.
2. Urgency — do you need it within the hour, close of business today, next week, next month, first available opportunity or 30, 60 or 90 days?
3. Type — single, transactional task or request for information (RFI) of a single POI category with no future updates, or a complex composite strategic project covering numerous POI categories that monitors and provides updates perpetually. This too, is really important to do the upfront work as a customer and don’t rely on your partners or vendors being able to interpret or read your mind on what to price or provide, not if you want to be successful at least.
4. Country — this sounds obvious but there are often fluid, geopolitical ground-realities that need to be considered. Most western nations are open and collecting data in public is permissible without complications or risks, while countries ruled by dictators or military leadership present the most significant challenges for field work. Ranking and creating a global risk index on an annual or semi-annual basis helps to align current realities with pricing and operational expectations.
5. Complexity — single attribution for all POIs, or multiple, conditional attributes dependent on POI category. For example, aside from device-generated location information, what manual or human-initiated attribution should be collected, such as a simple photo to a much more robust portfolio of hundreds of attributes per POI. Logically, the longer and more detailed list of attributes requires more time on location to document each POI as completely as possible, and this results in a higher cost per POI than simply snapping a photo.
6. Volume — ten, one hundred, ten thousand or “unknown, but all”. Knowing what you want collected and how many are to be collected in what geography is beneficial to all parties. Without this specific information, or at least some narrow range will yield, with utmost certainty, less than optimal performance, not to mention frustration and disappointment by all parties.

I was able, over time, to develop a simple yet effective model (formula? algorithm?) that combined the inputs to these six factors to yield a pricing model (as a service and content provider). This enabled the business to be highly responsive to customers and operate in a highly profitable, effective manner, for many years.

Get in touch with me if you interested in a deeper dive on this topic, among others, or would like some support in working through operational challenges in the field.