Item: Dovetail
Rating: 10
Author: Jose Montero

Overall Satisfaction with Dovetail

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Dovetail as our primary repository for our research artifacts, which include recorded video and written documents. Dovetail addresses our need to access a large library of research insights across several products in my organization. Dovetail also addresses the need for researchers to have a central place of storage for unstructured data such as video files from interviews, and easy transcription of these files.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Auto-transcription of videos in an easy and fast way
Smart search functionality to make it easy to find what you are looking for
Ability to create folders and organize our materials in an intuitive way for our stakeholders to find what they need

Cons

Although I think the smart search features which were launched within the last year or so are great, I would like to see more genAI-driven features. For example, auto-summarization of documents uploaded would be great.
I think DT could make it a little easier for researchers to know how to categorize their files. When I want to create a 'space' for a new project I choose 'Project' but others on my team choose other categories, so there is no consistency in how we understand the same thing.
DT needs to make their tagging process easier to do. It takes my researchers a long time to set up tagging across all files. I think this is something where genAI can help.

Return on Investment

Improved productivity due to ease and speed of creating and maintaining repository
Ease of access for stakeholders, which address our objective to make research from our team accessible to our organization

AI Capabilities

I suppose I haven't explored these as much because I do not have a lot of experience with some of these. For example, AI highlights sounds like my earlier feedback on having auto-summarization of uploaded reports. It would be great for DT to have webinars on these functions specifically since this is all the rage right now and an effective lever to improve team productivity. We already use automated transcription, it would be great if DT was able to auto-translate as well.

Team Engagement

Positive impact in that it makes research more accessible to the nonresearchers in our org, which creates awareness of our research team's work and has helped our business apply insights in their strategies and proposed initiatives.

Usability

Overall, it is easy to use DT. I do think there are some areas that could be more intuitive such as how DT categorizes files you upload. I do like how DT allows you to structure your folders, although it would be nice to have it easy to set up access restrictions.

Key Insights

Do you think Dovetail delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Dovetail's feature set?

Yes

Did Dovetail live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Dovetail go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Dovetail again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Displayr

Likelihood to Recommend

DT is the best repository service I have used for a team that supports a diverse array of products with research. It is great when you have multiple categories of products but also of research types. For use cases of research teams with very simple needs (i.e. 1 product supported, <20 reports a year) they could probably just use existing free tools in their org, such as sharepoint.

Comments

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Great Repository tool for Research Teams

Software Version