cybersecurity
Of all the responsibilities of a manager, research might not be one that you often find ranked towards the top. However, it is of incredible importance and something that plays more of a consistent role than you might expect. Market research is perhaps the most obvious example, but it’s far from the only one.
Being able to understand the lay of the land can give you every bit of information you need to navigate the landscape your business finds itself in. The only question is whether you can research effectively enough to do so.
Find Premium Sources
You don’t just want to get your information from reliable sources; you want to get your information straight from the primary, most trusted source possible. That means that you have to be able to identify an authority on a given subject, as well as what makes someone an authority, to begin with.
If you’re trying to better understand the landscape of digital security, for example, this is something that’s going to be mandatory for the continued protection of your business. Therefore, going anywhere other than the most trusted outlets to find your information doesn’t make sense. The annual cybersecurity report offers an incredibly thorough rundown of the most modern threats and how they can be countered. Still, the source also goes in-depth to explain the methodology behind this and any further acknowledgements for information that they have used – two factors that increase credibility.
Fact-Check
When you find information that you think will be valuable for the direction of your business, it’s important that you’re thorough in how you vet it before you decide to make it something you integrate completely.
One credible source that passes all the checks that you would use to identify it as such is important, but this information might be outdated, or it could be countered by another perspective. That means that finding multiple credible sources can give you as strong a sample size as possible – the same method that you might use when assessing which aspects of customer feedback you should listen to. Gaining all this information puts you in a prime position to make a well-informed decision.
Fundamental Research
While research might sometimes be an extra step that you take to better understand a particular area of business, there will be other times when it’s much more mandatory. For example, failing to conduct market research before you expand and open a new branch in a different location could have catastrophic results.
If you don’t understand the audience of where you’re going to be opening this new branch, you don’t know what kind of business you can expect from it. If you don’t know that, then you don’t know whether you’re going to make any money back on your investment, and you don’t know whether this venture is worth doing at all. Without research, the entire point of the expansion can begin to collapse in on itself.
