Asteroid

2004 Consensus Software Awards

Product Description

Asteroid is a tabulation software package that has been developed by Roy Morgan to support the internal and external analysis of the Roy Morgan media products and services. It was designed and developed by business users for business users with the analyst in mind rather than just another software package.

Asteroid enables and empowers users to easily manipulate, analyse and distribute information with the need for sophisticated support. Users are able to investigate any hypothesis without restriction because the result from every question is made available and the data is not aggregated or summarised in any way.

Asteroid is feature rich, adds value to you, the researcher, and has a number of in-built smarts that removes data complexity, and uses a proprietary database.

Asteroid has a number of unique features including some simple but effective statistical routines that have the outputs displayed is such a way that non-statistical users can comprehend and use the results. The unique features include:

• Search across all Asteroid databases for top-line results using AsteroidSearch. This is ideal for novice users or infrequent users of the data.

• Easy to use.

• Intuitive

  • Requires minimal training.

  • Places minimal impact on IT resources.

• Feature rich

  • Create Tables in a GRID view

    • Format the table output as you do in Excel.

    • Create templates to match your own preferences or Corporate standards.

    • Recall and apply templates on a needs basis.

    • Inter-change with Excel retaining the formats developed in Asteroid.

  • Generate Graphs from the Tables

    • Format the graph as you would in Excel.

    • Create templates to match your own preferences or Corporate standards.

    • Recall and apply templates on a needs basis.

    • Inter-change with Word or PowerPoint retaining the formats developed in Asteroid.

  • Report Folders

    • Enables you to manage and save Tables and Graphs for later recall.

    • Reuse for subsequent waves.

    • Link to the formats and templates for Table and Graph.

    • Auto inter-change with other office applications:

      • Save Tables as Excel file.

      • Save Graphs as Bitmaps and link the object in Word and PowerPoint.

  • Develop segments

    • Perception Maps - Correspondence Analysis - create hot quadrants and gain an understanding of the relationship between variables.

    • Descriptive segmentation - Profiler - understand the variables that explain the behaviour of a target market compared with a second market based on a set of variables.

    • CHAID Decision tree, Chi-Square Automatic Interaction Detector, understand the drivers of behavior of your target market based on a set of discriminating variables.

  • Create you own variables on the fly

    • Save continuously used filters.

    • Define new variables / segments to support your hypothesis.

  • Table outputs provide an indication of Significance Testing in two ways

    • Based on the Total (Asteroid calls this Individual).

    • Between column variables (Asteroid calls this group-to-group).

  • Asteroid supports datasets that span multiple levels, for example understand consumer behavior as opposed to the dynamics of other related information such as:

    • Credit Cards / Financial transactions.

    • Travel experiences.

    • Automotive expenditure.

• Distributable without restriction

  • Interchange tables and graphs with other office applications.

  • View and distribute table results

    • As a text file using Asteroid's Table Viewer.

    • PDF file with hyperlinks to an Index page.

  • Enables you to copy and share the User software without restriction.

• Cost

  • Not based on a user fee.

  • Users pay for the conversion of data into Asteroid (once per database).

• Secure

  • Database encrypted (users can't access unit records).

  • Confidentiality maintained.

  • Analysis not based on aggregated data.

• Supported

  • HelpDesk Hotline available without restriction.

  • Initial training provided as part of the service.

  • Follow up or subsequent training provided at a nominal rates.

  • Users can join the Asteroid User Group - where their opinion is important to us.

Innovation

Users have increasingly become more sophisticated in the analysis of research data and are demanding access to the results to test and evaluate their hypothesis. To that end, the inception of Asteroid was to empower users to formulate the framework for the analysis and work through the iterative analytical process.

Analysts of the Roy Morgan Single Source and Media data receive Asteroid as part of the service and can distribute the software without restriction, within their own organization.

If an organization commissions a research house to conduct research work, they can elect to have the results made available in Asteroid. Roy Morgan would therefore work with the other research house to receive and convert the data on behalf of the common client organization. The client organization would pay a once-off set-up fee per database. The organization can then distribute Asteroid to any or all of its data analysts without restriction, including the research house that was commissioned to perform the research.

How the Asteroid software is made available is therefore a divergence from the more traditional software pricing structures - per user fee.

Once analysts have access to their data in Asteroid they are able to:

• View results in tables and graphs

• Format the output in line with their own preferences or corporate standard

• Interchange the results with other office applications

• Create their own variables and save for future use

• Develop management reports and make it available for other analysts

• Apply some useful statistical techniques without the need of sophisticated skills

  • Descriptive Segmentation - Profiler

  • CHAID Decision tree - Ch-square Automatic Interaction Detector

  • Perception Maps - Correspondence Analysis

  • Significance testing (z-score)

  • Apply up to four weight sets in a single database (but one at a time)

When using Asteroid for tracking studies, Asteroid has been developed to support:

• Time series analysis including changes across time

• Hierarchical data - when information is collected about a subset of information, for example when collecting credit cards held by a single consumer.

Performance

Research data reflects a point in time situation and as such does not require to be accessed on a real-time basis. Asteroid has been designed to enable the analysts can access the entire data set with aggregation or summarization of the data. Therefore the Asteroid database does not suffer the constraints that exist in conventional relational databases or OLAP environments.

Because the entire data set is loaded into the Asteroid database, Asteroid's proprietary database has been designed with speed and flexibility in mind but does not compromise on the users ability to work with data at the lowest level.

The nature of research data requires the protection of respondent privacy and confidentiality. With that in mind, Asteroid was designed to ensure that respondent privacy and confidentiality is not compromised. It is imperative, therefore, to ensure the data is secure. Thus the Asteroid database has been encrypted so that analysts are not able to extract the raw data from the environment.

In addition, not all analysts require access to the same information. The Asteroid database can be highly customized to support an organization's access rules.

Another factor that needed to be considered was disk space. Because Asteroid contains the entire data set of the research work, the Asteroid database has been highly compressed to the extent that the size of the Asteroid database is about 10-15% of the original data set.

Potential

Some of our data subscribers have requested the ability to use Asteroid as their main tabulations software package. After experimenting with this concept, Roy Morgan has dedicated a team to the commercialization of Asteroid.

The commercialization of Asteroid is a good opportunity for Roy Morgan to expand its product and service offering. This opportunity has been identified after careful discussions with a number of research houses and client users. 

The development of Asteroid has always been based on client input and is part of Roy Morgan's continuous improvement program. However, the outcome of the discussions with the research houses and user clients has enabled Roy Morgan to put in place a major upgrade and redevelopment program for Asteroid.

Some users who subscribe to the syndicated Roy Morgan Single Source and Media data have requested to have some of their other research loaded into Asteroid so that they are able to apply the same analytical process an framework across their entire analysis requirements.

Other information the judges should know

Asteroid is the data analysis program that is revolutionizing market research, it is already operating in over 200 Australian and New Zealand sites plus a few in the US and UK / Europe.

An example of a table and graph refer to the attached PowerPoint Presentation

Asteroid Power Point Presentation  

Content2004Copyright©Roy Morgan Solutions
Format2004Copyright©Consensus Pty Ltd

End of page