Inquisite 1.2 builds employee surveys quickly, easily - computer software evaluation - Software Review - Evaluation

HR Magazine, Sept, 1999 by Jim Meade

Most companies conduct surveys, whether to poll employee satisfaction, carry out performance reviews or evaluate training courses or to do all three. Printed surveys can create a hopeless pile of paper that you spend months sorting. Inquisite 1.2, an electronic survey tool from Catapult Systems in Austin, Texas, automates surveys, allowing you to build, deploy and analyze surveys on the computer.

What It Does

To build a survey, you click the icon for Inquisite Builder in Windows 95, 98 or NT. You can choose to have a wizard guide you in designing your survey, or you can start with a blank survey and put in survey questions yourself.

Creating a survey is almost like working in a word processor or a graphics program. Your end product, though, is an electronic questionnaire complete with navigation buttons - next, back and finish - and standard buttons like radio buttons, which allow test takers to choose one answer from among several, for multiple choice questions.

To create a text question, click on an icon of a pencil. In the dialog box that comes up, type in your question and make choices about font and alignment. Inquisite then places a nicely formatted question on your questionnaire. You can also format the answer options where people choose one answer from a list, choose many answers, rank their responses and much more. Click an icon of a check mark, choose your type of question from a list box and type in the text of a question.

Once you've built your test, click to start another program where you preview your electronic test to see how it will look to test takers.

Click on another program icon to choose your database for the information you collect, such as Inquisite's own database. You easily make choices about how you want to deploy your electronic survey - whether to a World Wide Web server, a network, diskette or e-mail. Once you've collected the results of your survey, click to start the Inquisite Analyzer's statistical analysis of your results. If you like, you can export your data to Microsoft Access or Microsoft Excel.

What I Like

The greatest strength of this well-designed program may be what it does for HR. It helps HR poll essential information, reduces the costs of administering surveys, provides results immediately, improves the rate of response and increases the accuracy of the data.

With its standard Windows screens and dialog boxes, Inquisite is easy to use. "We had a temp put together a questionnaire of 20 questions for us in less than half an hour," says Jim Raab, an Inquisite user with Tivoli Systems in Austin, Texas.

Because it connects readily to a user company's databases, Inquisite allows you to collect and analyze meaningful data. "What I really like is that it accumulates the data over a period of time," explains Phil Charlton of Dell Learning, part of Dell Computer Corp. in Austin, Texas.

Inquisite's surveys have a neat overall look, and they come with built-in features you don't get with paper, such as "data piping," which is the ability to enter information once, such as an address, and then to apply it to all the places where it's used on the form.

The program also has great tools for analyzing and presenting the results, such as pie charts showing frequency distribution, for example, the percent of employees who gave your HR services an "excellent" rating.

Help is first-rate. From any dialog box, just click the help button for help on the current activity or read the overall electronic help document. The printed manual is thorough and readable.

Users find the technical support to be excellent. As Allan McLeland, organizational development manager for Sonoco Products Co. in Hartsville, S.C., put it, "I haven't had to use them a whole lot other than one initial issue."

"Within the first 30 days we get calls; then we never hear from them again," says Dean Cormier, Inquisite sales manager.

Thanks to its well-engineered nucleus, you can customize Inquisite easily. "We had trouble finding a product that would assist with the kind of reviews we do," says Lynne Woodward, HR information systems lead at the New York law firm Rogers & Wells. "[Catapult Systems] did a lot of customized work for us."

What To Watch For

A caution for potential HR users, says Raab, is to "Make sure you know what you want to do with it." Inquisite particularly makes sense for a company that does surveys already and simply wants to automate the process.

If your company really does know what it wants to do with surveys, keep in mind that you may want to customize Inquisite to prepare your special reports. Woodward, for instance, customized the software so that 10 to 12 partners in the law firm would review each of the firm's associates - a specialized use of the program for performance reviews.

Also, though the program is easy to use, it is nevertheless a program that creates forms and puts radio buttons, check boxes and text onto them. It is not a mere word processor. You may want to train one member of your department to specialize in Inquisite and to help others with it.