Introduction

You always need information for creating and realizing suitable IT solutions, for example (based on the goals of 5 research spaces of the DOT framework):

• to better understand the situation, so that you can come up with a suitable solution
• to be able to use existing expertise, and not waste your time reinventing the wheel
• gain insight into various solution options, and be able to make a suitable choice,
• to determine whether your solution meets what is needed and indeed solves the problem
• and whether your solution adds something compared to what already existed

You can state these kinds of questions in your Plan of Action, so that you can make clear what you are going to do, how this all contributes to your final solution, and whether the whole will be feasible. But sometimes it is difficult to think in advance what kind of information you actually need. You need to know what you do not know – that is very hard! Or maybe you have an idea of what to do, but you have trouble expressing the corresponding question.

This building block gives you some tools for thinking up and formulating research questions. In order to gain inspiration about what we could ask, we look at the goals you could have with these kinds of questions. Next, we will look at how you can turn questions that you are dealing with in practice (e.g. about how you should tackle something, or which decision to take) into research questions that give you the information you need. Then there is a short checklist that you can use to see if your questions are well-formulated. There is an assignment attached to apply the skills you learn here in your own project.

Tip: For this building block it is useful if you already have a rough idea of your goal. Otherwise it becomes very difficult to think about what information you need to achieve that goal.

Prerequisites
One of the components in this building block uses the DOT framework. For this, it can be useful to briefly go through the corresponding DOT framework building block. However, the teaching material in this building block is set up in such a way that it can be used independently.

P.S. Depending on what you are asked to deliver, you will or will not explicitly mention these kinds of questions. However, whether or not it is asked of you, it is always useful to be aware that you these are the questions you want to answer. That way you do not waste time on side tracks that actually do not contribute so much to your final goal.