Selecting technologies

How do you select the technologies to use in an e-consultation?

In each of our e-consultation trials we spent some time with our trial partners identifying how e-consultation could fit into their overall consultation strategy. Together we went through these stages:

1. Clarify the objectives of the consultation.
2. Identify participants and their needs (especially communication needs).
3. Work out what knowledge we want to learn (and how structured it needs to be).
4. Pick a few communication processes that will help 2 contribute to an understanding of 3.
5. Select technologies to support the communication processes in 4.
6. Combine these processes and technologies into a plan for the consultation.

Each consultation will involve a number of activities, some using ICTs and some using traditional techniques. Together they should engage all the desired participants and help them produce the knowledge and understanding needed for a particular consultation.

Note that this is a design process that starts from first principles. We analysed needs, broke them down into finer details, indentified individual steps, then synthesised them into a custom consultation design. Too often consultations are carried out just by following traditional routes, like sending out consultation documents and waiting for replies. The e-consultation equivalent is just to pick any technology you have heard of (e.g. discussion forums or online questionnaires) and then try to use it in every consultation, whether or not it is suitable for the participants and objectives. Like learning to drive, the first step is to engage your brain.