Teesside's Virtual Business Engagement Network (V-BEN)

I must start this post by saying a big thank you to Andy, one of our core project team, for his efforts in developing this first visual site draft.

Obviously a LOT of items were discussed across the various focus groups and prototype meetings we have held and it has been an exercise in itself to take stock of all the information and requests and formulate them into something tangible – and ultimitely workable as a live site.

We believe the chosen platform allows us the greatest flexibility whilst also incorporting much of what the various staff requested. Below is our first visual representation.

 As it stands we have already built in some of the functionality – live RSS feeds and a few other bits – and the next step is to now populate the various sections so that it is a reviewable state.

The plan is then to ask our focus group members to look over it, consider it, and feedback with comments. We’ll then be looking to streamline the site and tweak where needed before moving on to the actual visual design elements prior to our expected launch date of October 2012.

Having identified and met with our first cohort, this was our opportunity to view the project from the other side of the fence – those who currently have no involvement in business engagement.

One interesting outcome was the amount of commonality across the various staff we met with. Whether currently engaged in a business capacity or not, and across all the different schools and departments, many of the same themes and issues were at the forefront of discussions.

Too much email, information received from too many different sources and often duplicated, balance wanted between digital and personal contact. Just some of the common themes that we aim to address.

So what can we do??

Our initial de-brief highlighted the potential need for an ‘aggregator’ site. Somewhere that could act as a ‘one stop shop’ for all relevant business information. However, the challenge is to make this as user-friendly as possible whilst allowing some degree of personalisation and ways to incorporate/link with an individuals own way of obtaining and sharing information – i.e. social media interaction.

Onwards and upwards!

From the outset it was always the belief that dealing with business engaged and non-engaged groups of staff would be very different challenges.

This group – containing around 10 currently business engaged staff – was our first chance to discuss our ideas, and find out how staff obtain information, how they use it and, if at all, how they share it.

The group provided some extremely useful insights into the practicalities involved and in discussing the various tools used to get the information and knowledge people wanted – but also in identifying critical issues and barriers.

I won’t go into the detail for now – as I’m sure a more thought-provoking look at the results will be best left until after the second focus group in a couple of weeks time.

After a series of core team meetings we have now developed a structure for moving our V-Ben project forward. Many of the JISC toolkits and planning mechanisms (CAMEL etc) were discussed and taken into account along the way. As a starting point we intend to facilitate the following internal sessions during February;

Focus Group 1 – currently business engaged academics/staff
Focus Group 2 – currently non-engaged academics/staff

It is hoped that these two distinct groups will help us gain an insight into how staff approach business engagement, as well as the wider issue of how, what, where and why they access social media tools to aid them within their own work environments.

Teesside University’s Business Engagement strategy is a key institutional strategy with the aim of growing the commercial income and the range and scale of partnerships.

However, there is an urgent need to attract more academic staff to work in Business and Community Engagement (BCE).

Barriers to engagement are well documented and explored and we are about to launch an Internal Communication Strategy to address them which will be integrated with other organisational measures, e.g. HR policies and staff development. For example, we have recently implemented a HEA funded mentoring project which links experienced academics up with those new to BCE.

Now, this JISC project will implement a virtual collaborative network for University staff to underpin this work and support the work of the Department of Academic Enterprise in delivering its Internal Communication Strategy.

The Virtual Business Engagement Network [V-BEN] will be on a platform capable of holding a range of interactive tools and resources, linking to current SharePoint sites and other corporate ICT systems. It will be designed in discussion with its target audience and will contain both informal, user generated content and more formal content and links to other resources.

As part of this exciting project we will endevour to maintain this blog with regular, relevant and interesting information as a way of helping drive the project forward.

We hope you enjoy reading it in the process!