Launching your VIVO means making it available to a wider group than your project team, either open to the public or behind a firewall, to others in your organization. Your launch strategy drives the entire project, including the project timeline, resources, scope, support structure and communication plan.
Consider your goals
In some cases, the launch strategy will be determined early and may be linked to other business cycles, for example, at the beginning of the fall semester or before a certain faculty development or research event.
In other cases your mission statement or project goals will help determine your launch strategy. If your top priority is to present all faculty together in one system, then your launch strategy must support that goal. If your goal is to provide a proof of concept for faculty in your local CTSA group, then your launch will be much more contained. Hone your mission statement and goals to a few clear, prioritized objectives, and then create a launch strategy that meets the top objective as simply as possible.
In general, it's best to start small and add on with frequent iterations. Starting small with a few, like-minded and friendly stakeholders enables you to learn from the people who'll be using your VIVO instance. If you can't start small, try to launch as simple a system as you can. Plan on doing a pilot implementation first, and building in many feedback mechanisms from users, along with additional time to refine your implementation. Feedback not only helps improve your VIVO but it gives the community a chance to speak up about project and become more engaged.
Legacy systems
Your institution may have one or more legacy systems that VIVO will replace. Will your VIVO instance need to provide all of the features and data in the legacy system? Consider enabling both systems to exist in parallel for some time; sometimes replacing legacy systems can complicate your VIVO launch strategy and make the rollout more difficult than it needs to be. You can't do it all right away!
Data in your VIVO
One of VIVO's greatest advantages is aggregating data from multiple systems. But in most cases, this data must be updated in the source systems, not in VIVO. Communicating this message can be confusing and overwhelming for faculty. If your initial launch is streamlined, and data comes from just a couple of systems, your communications will be clearer and the initial workload to correct this data will be easier. Then as you add data, users will expect that it is edited in the original source and it'll be easier for everyone to figure out the workflow and processes to correct data.
Support mechanisms
As part of the launch, determine the processes for supporting users. Ideally, you can find local support people in each area who are already helping with websites or providing computer support. These are people that the faculty members already rely on for answers. It can be helpful to train and publicize these local "super users" or "power users" to prepare them to help faculty. Don't rule out the always-helpful librarians in your institution – they have fantastic ideas for providing support in a variety of ways.
Once you have determined your launch strategy, be sure to vet it with others in other groups, particularly with IT groups who have implemented other institutional systems. They may have valuable input on timing, resources, and publicity for your launch strategy.
