In recent years, developments in communication systems and computer technology have enabled communication between computers over vast distances utilising communications networks. Employing electronic mail, it is possible for a user of a personal computer (or any other type of computer) with access to a modem or other network communications interface, to communicate with any number of users of remote computers e.g., via the internet. Distance is no barrier. Further, in small or large companies electronic mail networks are often used to connect user terminals to enable communication in-house between users.
The possibility of communication with any number of users having access to electronic mail opens up vast information gathering potential.
To obtain and process such large amounts of information, however, presents a number of problems. Using electronic mail for a user of a computer may ask a question or questions of a relatively large number of remote users, by addressing mail including a question or questions to those users.
The task of processing responses to the question or questions becomes extremely difficult. Where a large number of users provide responses, the task can be almost impossible. This difficultly will be aggravated where a large number of questions are asked. The amount of information to process can be staggering and the user who asked the questions may be faced with the onerous task of sorting through a large amount of mail, item by item, to extract and collate the information he requires. Where a large amount of information is required from a large number of people, it is impractical for one person to deal with.
Consider the example of opinion polls, whether for marketing, political or other purposes. Presently, large numbers of field operators are required to gather numerous responses from members of the public. Once those responses have been gathered, hundreds and even thousands of man-hours are required to process the responses to extract the required information and present it in a form which allows for analysis. Thousands of questionaries may need processing, each with many Questions and responses. It should also be noted that the time taken to gather and process the responses can mean that the information finally revealed from the opinion poll has lost it's relevance or at least become less relevant. Consider a political opinion poll, where peoples opinions may be varying from day to day, significantly enough to affect the election result. An opinion poll which takes two or three days to process will be out of date and irrelevant by the time the results are available for publication.
There are really two major problems with presently available "surveying". Firstly, there is the problem of how does a person ask the questions of all the people he wishes to ask the questions of, without expending many man hours or employing a number of people as field operators? This problem is somewhat alleviated by the existence of systems such as electronic mail, which enable a person to select a number of people to send a single document to. There is the problem here, however, that no convenient means exists of asking a series of complex, linked questions. For example, a persons answer to a particular question may determine whether or not a subsequent question is relevant to that person. If the person is asked whether they are taking leave from employment that year to go on holiday, and answer no, there is no point in asking them where they are going on holiday. Electronic mail communication systems do not deal with that problem.
Even though electronic mail may be used to somewhat alleviate the problem of getting a question to a number of people, such systems do nothing to alleviate the problems associated with processing the answers. There is no alternative but for the person asking the question to sort through return mail item by item to, first of all, identify which mail is in response to his questions, and, then, to collate and process the responses to enable a meaningful analysis.
These problems are not limited to large surveys, such as political opinion polls. Even quite small surveys can present problems of time management. For example, imagine if a director of a company with fifty or so employees wishes to plan staff leave for the year. He has to ask all his employees when they would like to take leave. He may also wish to know where they want to go. He can do this by sending out a memo and awaiting the results, or perhaps even sending out a memo on intra office computer mail and awaiting the results. He still has to process all the results. Processing results, analysing them and planning the leave even of only fifty people can be quite time consuming, particularly for a person with many other responsibilities who does not really have the time to spend on such a task. Further, the managing director may wish to ask many different types of questions of his staff on a on-going day-to-day basis. His only option for processing the responses is to do it himself, item by item, or, if he has not got time (as is usually the case) to employ somebody to do it.