#fieldworkinnovation

By Paul Nnanwobu

When people talk about digital transformation, they often picture sleek dashboards, AI-powered analytics, or maybe drones flying over farmland. But in fieldwork—especially market and social research—it’s not quite that glamorous. Sometimes, it’s about persuading a team that a tablet will actually make their job easier than a paper form. Or realizing that a shiny new app is useless in a rural area with patchy internet.

I’ve been part of more than one transformation journey at Random Dynamic Resources Ltd, working out of both Nigeria and Canada. And if I’m honest, not every digital initiative was a roaring success from the start. You learn. Sometimes the learning is the real value.

One of the first lessons: technology alone doesn’t transform fieldwork. People do. I remember a data collection project spanning several West African countries. We had a state-of-the-art mobile survey platform, GPS tagging, real-time uploads—the works. But early on, upload rates lagged. We discovered that some field agents were saving surveys locally and planning to “sync later” because they worried about draining phone batteries in remote areas. It wasn’t a tech problem—it was a human trust issue. Once we addressed battery support and did more training, adoption soared.

That leads to lesson two: training is never one-and-done. Digital tools evolve quickly, but human habits… not so much. You have to keep showing, reassuring, sometimes re-explaining the same step in a different way. And that’s fine. A cautious operator is better than one who clicks through without understanding.

Third lesson? Connectivity is king, but you need a plan B. In rural Tanzania, our teams sometimes worked offline for days before reaching an area with a strong enough signal to sync data. We had to design workflows that allowed for both online and offline work without risking data loss or duplication. It’s not the kind of thing that gets written into glossy tech case studies, but in the field, it matters more than anything.

Another takeaway: analytics tools are only as good as the culture around them. You can pump real-time dashboards to project managers, but if they’re not actively interpreting and acting on those insights, it’s wasted potential. We started small—flagging anomalies early, celebrating “fast corrections” when they happened. That built a culture of responsiveness.

I should mention—our push toward smarter, more connected fieldwork has been part of a broader journey. This year, Random Dynamic Resources Ltd is proud to be nominated for the 2025 Go Global Awards in London, hosted by the International Trade Council. And this isn’t just about recognition. That event brings together the sharpest business minds from around the world. It’s a meeting ground for sharing exactly these kinds of lessons—what works, what fails, what might shape the next decade of global research. We’re looking forward to being in that room, swapping stories that don’t always make it into official reports.

Lastly—and this is perhaps the most human lesson—digital transformation in fieldwork should make the work feel better. Not just faster or cheaper. If your field teams feel more supported, if your clients feel more confident, if your data tells its story with fewer gaps—that’s the win.