A vendor's marketing department will incite staff

skeptic — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 19:25:38 +0000

A vendor's marketing department will incite staff by telling how the evil site has blocked the domain so they need to use their home connections. It might just make it worse.

Even if one asks vendors not to vote, they can still persuade one friend or family each. Sigh.

As in most web security, nothing will stop them if they really want to. One just hopes it will be obvious.

I will have to market it hard and hope to get a big enough pool to swamp the vendor effect.

P.S. It's not a poll I'm planning: it is a type of reviews.

It's not the voters, it's the questions

Mike Drapeau — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 11:49:54 +0000

Dear IT Skeptic,

Whether or not the vendor rigs the voting by stuffing the electronic ballot box with employees is the least of your worries. The problem with polls and e-surveys is not the voters but the people who develop the questions. The pseudo-science of polling for politics and other pursuits has long since been hampered by leading questions that do not explore all reasonable options in a voter's mind or that lead to erroneous conclusions. The standard example is those opinion polls that say "do you approve of the job right-wing Candidate X is doing?" 70% of the respondents say 'no' and the polling firm then concludes that the public now supports the left-wing Candidate Y. But wait. The assumption is that if you do not approve of Candidate X's position, your opinion must be closer to Candidate Y's. That is often not the case.

So too with our ITSM voter polls. The devil is in the details of the questions which, to be effective, need to be, literally, scientific. If you can get a sensical developer of quality questions then the problem of vote-rigging is a lay-up. Just block out the vendor domain. Frankly, if the vendor is half-smart they will WANT to have their domain blocked because a well-designed set of questions combined with a large survey response pool will provide them, for free, far more insightful information than they could acquire otherwise.

Cheers,
MD

The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Vendors should get a vote too? What do you think?"

A vendor's marketing department will incite staff

It's not the voters, it's the questions