Frequently asked questions

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General platform questions

How does the Harmoni platform approach storing, presenting, and sharing data?
Harmoni is an advanced data analysis and visualization platform designed to  optimize the way researchers and marketers handle various forms of market research data. 

Harmoni provides a comprehensive suite of tools to store, analyze, present, and share complex data in an intuitive and accessible manner, specifically:

• Storing: Harmoni acts as a centralized data repository where large, complex datasets from various research projects can be stored securely. It supports integration from multiple data sources, enabling pattern finding across your research assets.

• Presenting: The platform provides dynamic visualization tools that allow appropriately licensed users to create interactive charts, tables, stories, and customizable dashboards. This enables clear and effective presentation of brand insights, aiding in the quick interpretation and communication of results.

• Collaboration: Harmoni is designed as a collaborative platform where team members along with external stakeholders can work together efficiently to maximize 
the chances of extracting everything your data has to offer.

How much do Harmoni Licenses cost?
Harmoni license are $5,200 USD for Creators (Operations), $2,100 USD for Explorers (Market Researchers), and $25 USD for Viewers (Stakeholders). Data savvy market researchers can upgrade to a Creator license to access the most advanced features of the platform if required.

Creators are the true data experts, people with a deep understanding of how to process, integrate, clean, and organize raw data. Creators are experts in complex analysis, delivering data in a form that empowers others to work more effectively, understand people, and make better decisions.

Explorers use data every day to support better understanding. As insights often lie deeper in the data, Explorers go beyond standard reports to find answers to specific questions as they arise. With sufficient training, Explorers analyze the data and build specific, customized analyses and visualizations. 

Viewers are for stakeholders who use data to measure progress, assess growth, understand market position, and evaluate the competition. Viewers turn the insights discovered by others into meaningful action – and this is where the true value in your market research data culminates and is revealed. 



 

How much do Infotools Services cost?
No two market research projects are the same. Therefore, pricing can vary depending on several parameters - from how many questions and markets, to how clean the data is, how many waves, and how many dashboards. As a general rule, you could be looking at about $10,000 USD for a smaller questionnaire & dashboard to upwards of $40,000 USD for a larger questionnaire & dashboard deliverables.

Harmoni license fees are required alongside Infotools Services fees.

As there are projects that scale well beyond these estimates, we'd be happy to sit down and give more accurate pricing according to what you're setting out to achieve. 

If we give Harmoni access to stakeholders, won't market researchers be out of a job?
Not at all. The idea of giving Harmoni access to stakeholders means they can bring different perspectives to your findings, which may help your organization discover insights that may have otherwise been missed. 

In our experience, we have seen the value of market research teams within their organization significantly increase. This ultimately comes down to thinking about the work we do from a commercial perspective.

If market researchers can help their organization achieve greater outcomes, and this can be measured by using a tool like Harmoni, then the business is far more likely to double down on its insight investment.  

Does Harmoni (or Infotools) design and facilitate surveys or undertake data collection?
No. Infotools (and our platform Harmoni) is solely focused on preparing, investigating, and then reporting findings from market research surveys.

We made a conscious decision on day one to help agencies and corporate insights teams better understand their data. There's so many intricacies and complexities of market research data, so we've dedicated the past 33 years to understanding it better than anyone else. And we're very excited for what the future holds with the platform and for what's instore for the insights industry.

How is Harmoni funded? What kind of runway do you have as an organization?
Infotools is a market research-specific software organization that has been operating for over 33 years. Throughout this time, we have built up reputation and a stable of global clients to the point where we are self-funded. In 2021, we were acquired by Ipsos to facilitate the generation of insights from market survey data across their entire operations.

Infotools remains an independent organization, proudly serving the needs of our amazing family of clients.  

What is the cadence of reporting (i.e. real time)?
Data refreshes can be scheduled using the built-in schedule feature so can be as frequent, as necessary.

However often you want to refresh the data in your Harmoni projects, you can schedule that to your needs.

ChatHarmoni & AI questions

What is ChatHarmoni and what can I use it for?
ChatHarmoni is an AI-Led assistant that supports several Harmoni capabilities via a chat interface and pre-wired key AI functionalities.

You can do any of these things:

You can use the Quick Start Button Describe. This will assess the data you have uploaded and explain the contents of it to identify its theme, purpose and/or structure. A great way to know what is in your data!

The Quick Start Button Analyze will assess your data and look to suggest 10 warm-start, helpful analyses to help you begin investigating the data in distribution and cross-tabbed analyses. If you see one you like, you can click-to-run this also.

You can try the Quick Start Button Discover. This will assess your data and create an automatic AI selected, Bayesian supported (statistics) table representation of a Target analysis across several key descriptors from your data. Perfect way to understand statistical probability and relationships between targets and their comparison points.

You can ask ChatHarmoni to help you understand the data by Add/save your current table/chart to a story, and then use ChatHarmoni in your story preview to generate its commentary. This commentary can also be exported to PPT. 

There is also Finder, an AI-assisted search helps you identify content across all your stories and dashboards. Powered by ChatHarmoni, Finder connects your question to any story or dashboard you’ve created or that has been shared with you. When add appropriate tags to your data, the Finder feature uses them to surface the right topics and themes across your projects, stories, and dashboards.

What LLM supports ChatHarmoni?
ChatHarmoni uses a secure AI Gateway that provides data-protected access to three commercially available LLMs: Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude.

The AI Gateway is an enterprise-grade, closed circuit environment developed, trained, and refined by Ipsos specifically for the market research and insights industry.

ChatHarmoni can also be configured to let organizations use their existing LLM billing accounts (Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude). 

Can I use my company's LLM billing account with ChatHarmoni? And why would I want to?
Yes, Harmoni has included the option for our clients to use their own LLM billing account, provided it is Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini.

Brands may want to utilize this for governance purposes or to utilize special pricing they may have negotiated with their LLM provider. 

Can I use Harmoni without AI?
Yes. Harmoni has been completely re-engineered and has many features that make it competitive and productive without any AI functionality.

Whatever reason you might have for not using AI, Harmoni can and is being used successfully by major brands without ChatHarmoni. 

Furthermore, it is possible to turn on or off ChatHarmoni (AI functionality) at any stage. 

Data & security questions

Describe how you handle and store personal customer information?
Harmoni is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We are currently pursuing ISO 27001 accreditation framework. AWS, as a hosting provider, holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 certifications. SSO capabilities are supported, allowing integration with identity systems using technologies like SAML 2.0, OAuth, or WS-FED, enabling users to authenticate using Active Directory credentials.

We enforce encryption at rest using AWS KMS and SQL Encryption, and mandate encryption in transit via HTTPS/SSL/TLS for all connections.

A formal procedure exists for data deletion upon contract termination, with retention schedules for backups varying from daily to long-term archival, extending up to four months.

Continuous vulnerability assessments and penetration testing are implemented based on OWASP Top 10.

We implement disaster recovery drills annually, with specific recovery objectives, such as a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) within 12 hours and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) within 8 hours.

Other services involve 3rd party services from LANcom Technology for infrastructure support and OpenDNS for DNS resolution.

How is access to Harmoni, its dashboards, and its reports managed?
Access to Harmoni, the project tree, tables, stories, and dashboards is managed through a multi-layer process.

Every Harmoni user is authenticated via username and password (preferably via SSO) ensuring they have permission to access the system. Data is then only shared via the project owners to those who are allowed via a sharing interface.

Stories and dashboards follow a similar sharing mechanism as projects ensuring that the owners maintain control of who has access to what.

Specific functionality is chiefly determined by license type (Creator, Explorer, Viewer), with most market researchers best suited to use an Explorer license, and most stakeholders in the business using a Viewer license. 

Can Harmoni process respondent level data, do significance testing, and stat testing out of the box, etc.?
Yes, yes, and yes. Our organization was founded by market researchers 36 years ago. One of the big benefits of being around for such a long time is that we've come across just about every complex challenge you could think about in market research, and have addressed (or created workarounds) most of them. Therefore, nothing really surprises us. 

We've built our platform with market research data specifically in mind, which means there are a number of specific processes and calculations it does right out of the box. 

What happens to projects once we've finished with them?
Projects will remain in Harmoni in perpetuity or until you remove them. This means that you can continually come back to your studies and extract additional insight from them - even if you were to change suppliers or agencies.

You may also wish to add additional waves or other types of data to the projects as well, which means you can start to build up a picture of how your findings are or aren't changing over time. 

How does the Harmoni platform / dashboard go about storing, presenting and sharing?
Harmoni is now an Ipsos-owned advanced data analysis and visualization platform designed to optimize the way researchers and marketers handle various forms of market research insights.

Harmoni provides a comprehensive suite of tools to store, analyze, present, and share complex data in an intuitive and accessible manner, specifically:

•Storing: Harmoni acts as a centralized data warehouse where large, complex datasets from various research projects can be stored securely. It supports integration from multiple sources ensuring comprehensive data management and accessibility.

•Presenting: The platform provides dynamic visualization tools that allow users to create interactive charts, tables, stories, and customizable dashboards. This enables clear and effective presentation of brand insights, aiding in the quick interpretation and communication of results.

•Sharing: Harmoni is designed as a collaborative platform where insights can be shared seamlessly with team members and external stakeholders in the form of stories (combining charts and tables), which can be used to populate presentation documents or client-branded dashboards.
Describe your approach to purging records
All data is contained within a secure database for a particular customer. At the end of the customer contract this database is deleted as per any contractual requirements.

If there is a possibility that clients want to access their data in the future, storage fees could be negotiated. 

Would any client data be transferred outside of the UK/EEA region as part of your solution?
Harmoni has hosting in multiple regions to accommodate data sovereignty needs. There are Harmoni instances in Australia, the EU, and the US.

We can maintain data to remain within the hosting region at all times. Please talk to us if you require a data centre in a different geography. We are open to negotiating costs for setting up bespoke servers. 

Is the Harmoni platform SSO enabled?
Yes. Clients can request SSO in their Harmoni site with its best-practice security measures and protocols. This includes encryption, access control, and audit logs.

Harmoni supports the following SSO methods and protocols:

• SAML 2.0 (Security Assertion Markup Language)
• OpenID Connect
• WS-Federation (WS-Fed)
• OAuth
• Supported services include Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS), and other SAML 2.0 or WS-Federation based 
services.

• Encryption: All data transmitted during the SSO process is encrypted to protect sensitive information from unauthorized access.

• Access Control: Administrators can set specific permissions and access levels for users, ensuring individuals only have access to the data they require.

• Audit Logs: The platform maintains logs of access and activity, providing transparency and the ability to audit

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