Industry: Their information needs

On 4/8/15 I met with   Brenda Lazelle and Neb Svrzikapa, two Business Liaison Advisors in the Research Office. I wanted to grow my understanding of the needs of industry as an audience of our website, as they were often mentioned in the faculty workshops. They were both helpful, sharing many insights worth hearing. However, the summary of my thinking is that WIP II is unlikle yo address their needs particularly well, and the work might best be delivered by the core team or the engagement work.

Main points:

• Want access to the analytics for the Research zone
• Zone does not work for them or for their audience, so 
• Have identified many ways in which the content can be improved and ordered better
• Now want to engage with the web team to help improve things
• Want to highlight the main channels to contact VUW, meaning Reseach Office, who will in turn broker the connection to research staff
• Currently, website is not important to their industry contacts but believe it could become more important if it was better.
• Seemed to be saying that published research is not what their clients are after.
• Strong and urgent need for a CRM, so VUW staff look informed (about other contact) when meeting a client
• Would like access to improved staff profiles, as even with a knowledge of the university it is difficult to find the right people based on quality of current profile data.

On 11/8/15 I met with Bianca Grizhar, the Commercialisation Manager at VicLink. Her (web team or WIP related) interests included:

• Staff profiles: pretty much everything that as in the user stories
• More current content, with more delegated authoring and empowering more editors
• Better news, to showcase and celebrate achievements.
• Clearer channels for industry contact with VUW (staff), as per comments by Brenda and Neb
• Embedded twitter streams, ideally aggregated for all VUW staff. Would show how busy/relevant/with it people here are