Thursday 16 July 2009

Stakeholder Analysis Report

I have been busy these last weeks writing the BRII Stakeholder Analysis report. It is almost ready! I hope to have it finished by next week. Sally has already read it and she has made some suggestions. I am working on them now.

This report has over 13 thousand words (35 pages), and it will probably reach 14 thousand as I will write an executive summary after I finish it. To carry out this study I talked to approximatelly 30 people. Most of these interactions were formal interviews. However I have also included data from meetings and informal conversations. The stakeholder analysis report has a slight academic touch. I made sure I followed a planned methodology, which I designed considering the characteristics of this project and the characteristics of the University. I wrote about this in a previous post. From the data analysis process four overall categories of data emerged:
  • Stakeholders
  • Perspectives on Research Activity data
  • Research Activities
  • Content of data - sources of data
The findings of this study are explained around these categories. They describe the BRII stakeholders and their interests in research activity data as well as highlight some user needs. (User needs will be further explored in subsequent development related activities.) I will not go into details now and here as the report needs refinement. However I should add that during this study I have also gathered a list of data contributors for the Research Infrastructure. Most of them participated in the interviews and others were approached by Sally through other networking activities.

The plan after this report is ready is to distribute it across the University. I will start by sending a copy to all my interviewees - I am very grateful to them! Obviously I will also send copies to the Project Board.

After that I will start working closer with Anusha on the harvesting of data and with Monica on the design of the Blue Pages. Next posts in the BRII Blog will explain this. Do not know exactly how the development will be done as I am not a technical person, so I will need some input from my colleagues. My role so far will be to contribute with what I have learnt from the stakeholder analysis and to recruit people to come to the office to do some user testing for us. So if you are interested please email me!

On a different matter...

My BRII colleagues (Sally, Ben, Anusha and Monica) will attend a Semantic Web Technical Review Workshop next Thursday 23th of July. The workshop will take place in the University of Bristol and is organised by the ResearchRevealed project.

Sally and Ben will give a keynote in the Beyond the Repository Fringe 2009 (30th - 31st of July) which will take place in the University of Edinburgh. They will be talking about issues affecting digital repository development and content.

I will attend the OR51 in Warwick (8th to 10th of September.) I will present the findings of the BRII Stakeholder and User needs Analysis in the Information Systems stream.
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