The benefits of building a dedicated insights hub

In the inaugural post of our ‘Maximising existing research: 0 to 1’ blog series we unpack some of the key benefits of building an ‘insights hub’ to manage your existing research. Whether you’re new to the idea of an insights hub, or if this is something you’re already seriously considering, we hope this post provides you with what you need to get the conversation started with your teammates and stakeholders.

Dan Robins

July 18, 2022

What is an ‘insights hub’?

If you’re reading this post, you may already be familiar with the term ‘insights hub’. But relatively speaking, this is still a fairly new term within the field of user research. One that has become a trending topic of discussion within the Research Operations community.

So to kick off the inaugural post in this ‘Maximising existing research: 0 to 1’ series, we’d like to take the opportunity to first ensure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to what exactly an ‘insights hub’ is.

We’ve seen and heard various definitions across the field, but in its simplest form:
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An insights hub is a dedicated place to store and share the key findings from your research.

It’s generally a space to store research insights, that’s separate to where research is conducted. It’s designed to be shared and searchable across an organisation.

It’s worth noting that we use the term ‘research’ here fairly broadly - this might include quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, secondary research, industry research, technology research…it’s our belief that insight and collective knowledge have no distinct boundaries.

We’re big fans of the recent ReOps article that details the community’s exploration of the topic, and provides a much deeper definition. The article also looks at how the ‘insights hub’ compares to other types of research repository such as ‘research registers’ and ‘research libraries’. This definition is one that we often reference alongside our ‘in a sentence’ approach above to help teams understand the purpose of an insights hub.

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What are the key benefits of building one?

The benefits we’ve decided to focus on here are certainly not exhaustive. They’re based on our own experiences from building insight hubs with lots of different teams, and the conversations we’ve had with other teams and customers who’ve also succeeded at this.

So now that we’ve established what an ‘insights hub’ is, let’s take a look at some of the key benefits of building one, before breaking down what each of these means in practice:
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You’ll stop wasting time searching for and repeating research; and start maximising the value, impact, and visibility of key research findings.
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You’ll spot new patterns in your research findings (and understand what’s missing).
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You’ll accelerate your team’s productivity, without having to change your existing research process.
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You’ll reduce organisational and personal risk of data security breaches.
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You’ll increase the potential of discovering potentially game-changing opportunities for your business.

Let’s break each of these down.

1. You’ll stop wasting time searching for and repeating research; and start maximising the value, impact, and visibility of key research findings.

Building an insights hub means you can quickly see what’s been researched before, and ensure you’re getting that repeatable value from your existing research.

We often hear the same frustrations around wasting time and repeating research from different teams:

"We're often asked at the last minute 'can you send me everything you have on…x”
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“Onboarding onto a new project or team is time consuming, information is often scattered or unavailable.”
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“I’m often asked to do research that I later find out has been done before.”
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“It takes a lot of time and effort to package up our insights for stakeholders.”
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“We often operate in silos and don’t always share our insights across teams and disciplines.”

Building an insights hub means that your key research findings are indexed and organised within one central repository. If you’re looking for something super specific, you can use filters (ideally powered by your taxonomy) to quickly narrow down your search by different topics. This can save hours in comparison to endlessly searching through old research reports and shared drive folders. That means less time searching for and repeating existing research, and more conducting new research.

Aside from the obvious benefits of having quick and easy access to existing knowledge for researchers, stakeholders also benefit from increased visibility of insight - and therefore, so does your business. This means fewer requests from stakeholders for insights, and an increased ability to make timely, informed, and de-risked decisions. Win-win.

A dedicated insights hub also allows you to more easily communicate and share insights with wider areas across the business. It’s unlikely you’ll want to share raw data and the full analysis with ‘less product focused’ stakeholders. Aside from the fact that this can often be overwhelming, you’ll also be at risk of breaching data security regulations (we’ll talk more about this in point 4).

The boost that comes with heightened productivity, and the feeling that your work delivers value and impact beyond the initial study for both researchers and stakeholder alike, can also have immeasurable benefits to how a researcher feels about the research they’re conducting for a business.

All of this helps you to maximise the visibility, value, and impact of your research (and who doesn’t want their work to be impactful and deliver maximum value?). You benefit, your stakeholders benefit, and so does your wider organisation.

2. You’ll spot new patterns in your research findings (and understand what’s missing).

One of the largest benefits of building an insights hub is the ability to start spotting previously unseen patterns in your key findings.

Having data indexed and organised within one central repository at the ‘insight level’ (as opposed to a ‘raw data / nugget level’), means that it’s far easier to spot new themes and emerging patterns in your collective knowledge - enabling collaboration across multiple different disciplines and teams. This leads to less siloes, and increased alignment around customer needs.

An interesting (and often unexpected) benefit of building a dedicated insights hub is the ability to spot gaps in your knowledge. Sometimes we might feel like we have a significant amount of insight in a particular area or domain, but that might not necessarily be true when all the data is laid out on the table.

Building an insights repository and organising the data you already hold can be a fantastic opportunity to challenge pre existing beliefs and ideas surrounding customer and strategy. As Trevor Bragdon brilliantly puts it in this fascinating short read, “your solution might not be in what is there, but what is missing”. Trevor tells the story of how Abraham Wald (a Hungarian born mathematician), used missing data to determine where to add armour to bomber planes during WW2.

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3. You’ll accelerate your team’s productivity, without having to change your existing process.

A good, dedicated, insights hub will integrate with your existing research tools and work seamlessly with your already established processes.

One way we describe what we do to people when we’re introducing ourselves at Dualo is:

We work with teams who do great research, but struggle to maximise the impact of their work across the organisation.

More often than not, we work with research teams that know how to do great research and they’re already using best-in-class tooling. They have the autonomy to use the tools that are most suited to their needs, so they’re not looking to change their entire research process or the tools they use to actually conduct research.

Having a dedicated insights hub, designed to fit in seamlessly to today’s best practice research processes, means that research teams can accelerate their productivity, without having to drastically rethink your existing process or toolstack. Empowering teams to start driving towards best practice insight management.

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4. You’ll reduce organisational and personal risk of data security breaches.

By packaging up and storing insights in a separate, dedicated space you’ll also reduce the likelihood of the organisational and personal liability risks associated with data breaches.

Why?

When centralising knowledge and insight with the intention of sharing it across an organisation, breaching PII (‘Personally Identifiable Information’) regulation is always going to be a risk. If you intend to share the findings from your research outside of your immediate team (one of the major benefits of building an insights hub), then you need to be extremely careful about how you do it, and what you share.

As a general rule of thumb, the larger your internal audience, the more at risk you are of breaching data privacy laws. This is a very serious subject for both your organisation, and you as an individual:
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Organisations can be held liable for data protection breaches (including sharing PII internally), and heavily fined.
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Individuals can also be held liable (this includes personal fines, and even imprisonment).
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‍Kasey Canlas presented a brilliant talk on good data practices and protecting the identity of your research participants at this year’s ReOps conference - we’d highly recommend checking it out (Kasey’s talk starts at 03:04:25, Session 1).

Having a secure space, dedicated to capturing and sharing only your highest level research findings has been found to dramatically reduce the risk of leaking personal data, and is a significant driver as to why many teams are choosing to go down the path of building dedicated insight hubs.
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‍💡 Avoiding PII risk is one of the top sighted reasons why teams choose to build their insights hub in Dualo.

5. You’ll increase the potential of discovering potentially game-changing opportunities for your business.

And finally, potentially the biggest benefit of all (and one that’s often forgotten about), is the opportunity potential that a single insight can represent.

Making the day-to-day lives of researchers and stakeholders easier is of course a huge benefit, and a worthy enough reason alone to build an insights hub. But let’s not forget…
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Just one insight can completely change the course of a business.

One insight landing in the consciousness of a decision maker at the right moment has the ability to completely redefine a strategy or even pivot the direction of an entire product or business. You dramatically increase the chances of a strategy defining insight getting into the right hands if you’re making a collective effort to centralise and organise your existing knowledge across tools and teams

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The cost of not acting

If the benefits to building an insights hub that we’ve gone through today still leave you pondering over whether building an insights hub is right for you and your team, we’d finally like to offer a more quantifiable reason why not building one, could already be costing your organisation dearly…

Whilst it’s impossible to quantify the full range of benefits that building an insights hub can provide, our own data combined with industry statistics consistently point towards the significant costs that organisations incur by not having access to existing research findings:

When insights are scattered across tools and teams, we waste 59 minutes a day searching for information hidden within different apps, and professionals conducting research lose a further 20% of their time duplicating previous work. Given the average annual cost to the business for a full time User Researcher in the UK is £65,000, this could be costing your organisation up to £16,250 per researcher, per year.

Given the average User Research team has 5 or more full-time researchers, it’s easy to see how quickly the idea of building a dedicated insights hub can add up into a compelling business case.

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Conclusion

What we’ve gone through today is based on our own experiences and those of the researchers we’ve spoken to and worked with to index existing research across tools and teams. Whilst it’s certainly not exhaustive, hopefully it’s clear that there are a whole host of reasons why teams are choosing to build dedicated insight hubs.

We’ve talked about some of the key benefits, and also looked at some of the costs associated with not acting. So if building an insights hub is something you’re seriously considering, hopefully this article provides you with what you need to start the conversation with your teammates and stakeholders.

If you’re still hungry for more insights and success stories, you can also find case studies on our website. We’re still learning about this new and fascinating field and would love to hear about your experiences too. Reach out and say hello if you’d be interested in having a chat.

In our next post in the 'Maximising existing research: 0-1' series, we look at some of the upfront discovery work you’ll want to do with your team ahead of jumping into building an insights hub. You’ll gain a better understanding of the process that people currently follow to manage research insights, highlight their biggest pain points, and start thinking about how best to solve them.

Until then folks, happy researching!

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