Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Irish Social Services Web Portal Wins Accessibility Award, Boosts Traffic 50 Percent
Overview
Country or Region:Ireland
Industry:Government—National
Customer Profile
With offices at several locations throughout Ireland including Dublin, the Department of Social and Family Affairs delivers social insurance and assistance schemes to 1.5 million people. It has approximately 5,000 employees.
Business Situation
The Department wanted to offer more accessible, efficient services and better information to Irish citizens through an upgraded Internet portal and a more efficient content management solution.
Solution
The Department used the portal and Web content management capabilities within Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 for a modernized Web presence that offers dynamic content and e-government services.
Benefits
Improved accessibility
Increased service levels
Better access to information
Streamlined content management / “Our Office SharePoint Server-based Internet portal has allowed us to enhance our online delivery of information and services.”
Peter Scully, Assistant Principal Officer, Customer Channels Unit, Information Services, Department of Social and Family Affairs
The Department of Social and Family Affairs in Ireland promotes a caring society by providing income and other supportsto enable active participation in society, promote social inclusion, and support families. It wanted to use the reach and immediacy of Internet communications to raise public awareness of its mandate and provide secure e-government services. To accomplish these goals, the Department had to upgrade its HTML-based Web site and streamline its content publication processes. It chose Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to support its portal and launched to immediate acclaim. The site boasts 50 percent more content, improved search, intuitive navigation, and new online services. It won an Irish eGovernment accessibility award. The new portal is supported by a streamlined Web publication process that significantly reduced the time required for major site updates.
Situation
With offices in several locations across Ireland, the Department of Social and Family Affairs develops social protection policies and manages the delivery of statutory and non-statutory schemes and services. The Department is responsible for a range of social insurance and social assistance schemes. More than 1 million people each week claim a social welfare payment and, when qualified adults and children are included, a total of more than 1.5 million people benefit from weekly payments. The total expenditure by the Department in 2008 was just under€17.8 billion (U.S.$24.9 billion) with an estimate for 2009 of expenditure inexcess of €21 billion ($29 billion).
The Department’s income and support services impact the lives of almost every person in Ireland, so user-friendly, accessible, and efficient public communication channels are vitally important. As part of an overall, strategic goal to maximize customer service and minimize cost of delivery, the Department formulated its Channel Strategy to improve how it interacts with its customers. The Department’s public-facing Web site is a key customer service channel, offering a cost-effective platform to disseminate timely information and provide scalable, reliable e-government services.
Low-Impact Web Presence
There were, however, a number of issues that reduced the potential of the Internet site to live up to the Department’s Channel Strategy. The Web site had evolved without any formal content management system or information architecture. The site ran on an ageing infrastructure and consisted of a collection of static HTML pages with tables and charts. “We wanted a more dynamic Internet presence that presented information on our wide range of schemes and services in a more accessible, user-friendly way,” says Peter Scully, Assistant Principal Officer, Customer Channels Unit, Information Services at the Department of Social and Family Affairs. “It was difficult for people to navigate through the site and to find the information they needed.”
The Department wanted to improve its Web site’s compliance with World Wide Web Consortium’s Triple-A standards for accessibility and the Irish National Disability Authority Guidelines. “We know that a proportion of our customers may have varying levels of ability and literacy, and we were determined that this shouldn’t be a barrier to accessing our online resources,” says Fiona McManus, Administrative Officer, Information Services at the Department of Social and Family Affairs. “It is also important that we are able to offer online content in different languages, especially given the increase in immigration in Ireland. We also have to comply with Ireland’s Official Languages Act, which mandates that government content be published in both English and Irish. The old site was only available in English with just a few key documents available in Irish.”
Manual Content Management
Delivering timely information and updated services to a public-facing Web site requires an efficient content management and publication workflow behind the scenes. However, the Department’s manual Web content management process hindered employees’ ability to update the site. Employees sent information from around the country in the form of e-mail messages, CDs, or printed documents to the team responsible for publishing content. Team members then created HTML pages using Dreamweaver and performed a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) transfer to the host for publication on the Web site.
The Department’s Internet portal was reviewed by an external consultancy in 2006. The review suggested a complete upgrade of the Web portal from an information repository to an interactive site that offers online services for the public. “The Channel Strategy talks about using advances in technology to improve the customers’ experience of dealing with the Department,” says Scully. “Our ageing Web site offered an opportunity to do just that. We needed to find the right platform to support and manage our Internet portal so we could provide more accessible, convenient e-government services and more current, dynamic content.”
Solution
As it turned out, the Department of Social and Family Affairs already had the solution that they were looking for. The Department had entered into a Microsoft® Enterprise Agreement in late 2007 and acquired Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. The Information Systems Division at the Department promptly endorsed Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the communication, collaboration, and content management solution. Currently, Office SharePoint Server 2007 is being deployed to support their Office Systems Modernization project. This project includes the development of a new corporate intranet, as well as global content management and digital information management policies for the entire Department.
“It made sense to capitalize on the extensibility of the Office SharePoint Server 2007 product and bring our Internet site onto the same platform,” says Scully. “Consolidating everything onto Office SharePoint Server 2007—our Internet site, our intranet, our end-to-end content management solution—would reduce the cost of producing and disseminating content and services for our constituents so we could more easily achieve the goals of our Channel Strategy.”
In May 2007, following a public procurement process, the Department engaged Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, PM Centrix, to help design the new public-facing portal. “PM Centrix has a solid reputation as a center of excellence when it comes to Office SharePoint Server,” says Scully. “We also liked their track record with regards to accessibility and usability.”
PM Centrix and the Departmentoverhauled the site’s information architecture and developed a new user interface compliant with the most stringent accessibility and usability standards. They built 70 subsites incorporating intuitive navigation around logical groupings of information and services that would help people find what they want using aids such as tabs and role-based personas.
The old Web site’s HTML pages consisted of standard elements, such as headers and footers, as well as page-specific, information elements. PM Centrix devised a content management system based on Office SharePoint Server 2007 for the new site that helped with the migration. The team separated the standard elements as “templates” and the page-specific information elements as “content.” Before migrating any old content, the team built the standard template elements to conform to the Triple A accessibility requirements. These standard template elements ensured that the pages would conform to a higher level of accessibility and usability than the old Web site. Each template is built so that it will work correctly in screen readers.
“We used a best practice methodology in designing everything outside of Office SharePoint Server first,” says Donal Olden, Chief Executive Officer at PM Centrix. “We started with about 6,000 pages and 3,000 content items, but we also added content, so ended up at around 12,000 pages. Where possible, we took advantage of the out-of-the-box capabilities of Office SharePoint Server, such as its capability to handle different languages.”
To upload new content, the Department uses the new Office SharePoint Server 2007–based Web content management process developed by PM Centrix. “We haven’t gotten to the point where the process is entirely automated, but today we receive content update requests through e-mail only,” says McManus. “That means we can copy and paste into the Office SharePoint Server environment and we are no longer retyping content, reducing the opportunity for errors. In the long run, we are going to delegate the entire process of updating content to business owners in individual service areas.”
The portal boasts additional content thanks to syndication with the Web site of Ireland’s Citizens Information Board, and RSS news feeds. The site also enables online applications for services made possible through the extensibility of the Office SharePoint Server 2007 infrastructure that can integrate with the Department’s back-end claim processing system called the Business Object Model (BOM).
The Department launched its new site in September 2008. “Our Office SharePoint Server-based Internet portal has allowed us to enhance our online delivery of information and services,” says Scully. (See Figure 1.)
Benefits
Today, the Internet portal for the Department of Social and Family Affairs is one of the most heavily used government sites in Ireland. Traffic to by almost 50 percent between January 2008 and January 2009. Since launch, average weekly visits to the site have increased by approximately 20,000, or 53 percent and form downloads have also increased. E-mail requests for more information have more than doubled in the same period. “An increasing number of our customers are choosing our Web site as their main communication channel with the Department,” says Scully. “This will be of great assistance in achieving our objective of maximizing customer service and minimizing the cost of delivery.”
There are many reasons for increased interest in the Department’s new portal. The site is more accessible, it provides new content and e-government services, and it boasts an intuitive hierarchical navigation and better search engine so people can find the information they need. And behind the scenes, the Departmentbenefits from a robust, integrated content management system that streamlines the publication process.
Improved Accessibility
It didn’t take long for the Department’s redesigned Web site to garner the attention of Ireland’s e-government award adjudicators, the Public Sector Times publication, and Web expert Elucidate, in association with eircom. The awards are a benchmark for excellence in Irish e-government and recognize the innovators, developers, and experts who are pioneering changes in how the Irish government delivers services to its citizens. In February 2009, the Department of Social and Family Affairs won the e-government award for most accessible government Web site in Ireland.
From January to June 2009, more than 20,000page views availed of the site’s accessibility features, which include large fonts and high-contrast layouts. Another aspect of improved accessibility, which underscores the site’s relevance to a changing population in Ireland, is the availability of some documents in nine languages other than English. For example, the Polish Language version of the SW4 Guide to Social Welfare Services booklet is consistently one of the most downloaded documents on the Website with almost 7,000 downloads between January 2009 and May 2009. Today, the site is available in both Irish and English.
Increased Service Levels
The new portal provides an extensible infrastructure for the Department to deliver convenient e-government services. In March 2009, it launched an online application for customers applying for State Pension Contributory and Household Benefits Package. The Department’s Business Object Model system identifies a person approaching his or her sixty-sixth birthday and who has sufficient social insurance contributions to qualify for a state pension. That person receives a letter inviting them to apply online. Customers can log on to a secure area of the site using a Transaction Identification Number, complete the form, and click a button to submit it to the BOMfor processing.
“We cut out a lot of steps for the customer, and the fact that this system uses an existing workflow will save us money and time,” says Scully. “We are transitioning a lot of schemes to the BOM. The more schemes we can move onto this system, the more schemes we can offer access to on our Web site.”
Another benefit of the new site is that Department employees now have a much better resource to help people that either telephone a customer service representative or walk into one of the offices. “Staff are very positive about using the portal to help provide faster service at the counter, especially through the easy A to Z index that helps them find forms and print them instantly,” says Scully. “For our customers, this is a big improvement from having to wait for forms in the mail.”
Recent economic challenges have thrown into relief the site’s value to the rising number of unemployed people in Ireland. Over the last number of months, people have turned to the site for information in growing numbers: For the first six months of 2009 there has beenalmost 300,000 pageviews on the “I am unemployed” link and 106,000 on the jobseekers support page. “Many of our newly unemployed customers are younger people who naturally turn first to the Internet for information,” says Scully. “These statistics show the benefits in providing accessible, easy to use information on our Web site.”
Better Access to Information
The site’s hierarchical information architecture defines a new level of information access that’s a key success factor in its overall usefulness. A simple layout and intuitive navigation combine to simplify the Department’s complex organization into easily discoverable offerings of information and services.
“The use of personas on the home page is very helpful for people to immediately indentify where they need to go on the site,” says McManus. “If I’m a new parent, I can click on the persona and it immediately takes me to where I can see all the information and services available for me. The layout on the scheme pages is also great, with all the basic information syndicated from Citizens Information on the left and all the application formsand useful links on the right.”
Streamlined Content Management
With the Office SharePoint Server 2007–based content management system in place, staff members have achieved major site updates, such as reporting on the new annual budget, 50 percent more quickly. “The new content management system has significantly reduced the amount of time taken to update or add large documents to the Department’s Website,” says McManus. “Press releases that would have taken an hour to publish on the old sitecan now be completed and published in about half the time.”
“Today, Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key part of our technical infrastructure,” concludes Scully. “Thanks to our new portal, we are maximizing customer service and minimizing cost of delivery.”
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