Background
The
Brisbane City Council is the largest local government in the Southern
Hemisphere with a wide variety of public customers.
With increasing demands on the Corporate Website team, implemenation of a content management system was esstential. The management team saw this as an opportunity to re-organise the information architecture, improve the user interface and user experience.
Challenges and Opportunities
This project entailed a number of challenges including:
- The cohesive organisation of numerous government departments and external vendors;
- Transfer of content from one information into a different information architecture;
- Late changes in interface design and information architecture; and
- The content management system employes a propietry development environment and language.
Solution
The essential element to the successful implemetation of this project was the business case approach to the requirements placed on technical solutions. In addition to a technically flexiable off the shelf content management system, there were over a hundred customisations required, each validated against business requirements.
With approximately 2000 pages to migrate from the existing website, therefore sucessful migration was essential. In addition to the normal migration issues, the information architecture of the old website differs from the new information architecture. I devised a method of mapping differing Information architectures. The method allowed the business owners to drag and drop headings and sections within a hierarchy representing website structure.
Benefits
The revises website was released on time on the 7th of June 2004. Since this time both the content editing and development teams have experiences a high level of uptake, meeting a number of key performance indicators such as content turn over and development speed.
The content mangement system has proven a good fit with the organisational culture and enables the department to quickly re-configure the group and adapt to changing requirements.
The migration process was highly successful, with an approximate 99.3% accuracy level. Continuing changes within the development team are imporving quality, effeciency and organisational knowledge. A combination with a young development team and new development environment allowed me to develop a set of tools and processes that institutionalise rapid development and lessons learned.
