Guide to On-line Survey Technologies and the CMT
Online Survey - Application Service Providers

Description

Developed as an alternative to installed software solutions, on-line survey subscription services such as formsite.com or surveymonkey.com offer users the ability to rent or lease access to on-line survey software operating on the vendor's website. Users purchase, for a nominal fee, the right to design and administer surveys. No software is installed or downloaded, rather users design and administer their surveys directly from the vendor's website.

Strengths

Inexpensive: The cost of administering surveys can be a fraction of purchasing and operating one's own software package. (e.g. $300 per survey) Some services offer basic services for free. This low cost option is well suited to the occasional user.

Functionality: Many of these products (e.g. www.surveymonkey.com) offer functionality comparable to that of the best commercial off-the-shelf products. Survey design, administration, and analysis, is straightforward and relatively simple to use.

Issues

Security: The main concern with this type of service is security. Data is housed off-site and stored on the vendor's server. While most surveys in general, and the CMT survey in particular, do not contain personal information, many managers are reluctant to have data pertaining to their operations hosted on a third party web-servers.

Little History: As many of these services are relatively new there is little experience upon which to evaluate issues such as customer support and reliability. One jurisdiction with some history with this technology is the State of Florida's Department of Revenue. Officials report an excellent track record of using of www.formsite.com to deliver surveys to staff.

Example: State of Florida's Department of Revenue

State of Florida's Department of Revenue - Is an example of a jursdiction that makes use of fee for Service Services, specifically www.formsite.com, to deliver surveys to staff.

The screen shot below is an anonymous performance evaluation and assistance with career development survey, done by the department for it's employees.