The efficient management of content across multiple sites is a challenge for any organisation faced with the task of developing and managing a web presence for each service offered.
For local authorities, this challenge is significant due to the range of services offered to a wide spectrum of community and business groups.
Although there is a high level of 'commonality' across council sites, typically each department or service area has historically developed a bespoke website resulting in major duplication of effort and content development.
Rossendale Borough Council's strategic response to this issue has been to develop an integrated enterprise content management (ECM) system based on three key criteria:
- Seamless integration - a totally integrated approach across multiple community areas to avoid duplication of effort and content.
- User generated content - development driven by non-technical users 'concept to end deliverable' who also take total ownership of content development.
- 'Built-in' efficiency savings - increased development efficiencies and cost savings.
This development has delivered dramatic increases in website performance and has already demonstrated significant customer adoption of web-based services offered by Rossendale.
Rossendale's CMS success has created a rising demand from a wide range of community areas within the council, for additional 'personalised' mini web portals or 'microsites'.
This has been met by Jadu Galaxies, a revolutionary CMS delivery platform that is unique in the global market in its abilities to cost effectively support multiple CMS driven websites within an organisation.
Jadu Galaxies is closely integrated with Jadu CMS and has enabled Rossendale Borough Council to achieve a 'step change' in development of an integrated ECM strategy by enabling:
- Webmasters and site editors to design, build, integrate and manage multiple web content management systems within a fraction of the time required by alternative development approaches (standard deployment time is just 30 minutes).
- Non-technical users to design accessible templates, develop taxonomy and web navigation and change content with minimal training.
- Compliance to international accessibility (WAI) and government interoperability (eGIF) standards as well as metadata standards such as IPSV.
So far Rossendale Council has implemented Jadu Galaxies in two service areas (Tourism and the Local Strategic Partnership) with the Area Action Plan in development alongside plans to implement a series of dedicated sites for councillors to be able to share information with their constituents, as an enabler for e-democracy.
The technical integration capabilities of Jadu Galaxies have proved a major efficiency saving. We are going through a period of innovation and rapid development. Our ECM strategy and Jadu Galaxies means that we can deliver a single view of content effectively using one application and one website.
Andrew Buckle - Head of ICT - Rossendale Borough Council
"Rossendale has made some very intelligent choices in the implementation of their ECM strategy. Having completed the implementation of content management as a corporate system with their website, they are now engaging with the community and their own service units to deliver CMS systems using Jadu Galaxies. Crowning this will be a Google Enterprise search and a Jadu Intranet CMS - which helps them manage knowledge and documents over their enterprise" says Suraj Kika, CEO of Jadu.
The Tourism and Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) initiatives are being managed by Miladur Rahman, Community Partnership Officer.
The development process has been rapid. Miladur outlined the requirements to Usman Hamid, Rossendale's web developer, who within 10-15 minutes was able to create a basic template providing branding and colouring using Jadu Galaxies. "It's not technical - what you see is what you get" says Usman. "It's very simple to use - you can view changes in real time and this visualisation gives confidence to non-technical users".
After a half-day's training, Miladur, a non-technical user with no previous experience of web design, then developed the web navigation, headlines, key categories and added the content. "Once you got the hang of it, it got easier and easier" says Miladur.
Jadu Galaxies was also used to develop the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) for the Borough of Rossendale. All sites generated by Jadu Galaxies are fully eGMS metadata compliant with the IPSV (Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary) taxonomy.
A key strength of the Jadu Galaxies approach is its ability to enable integration between independent sites within an organisation, particularly the ability to import services from the A-Z listings and web content of the main Rossendale Council site into the community site and have them displayed on the Jadu Galaxies A-Z page.
It is also planned to integrate news and events between sites to further minimise content addition, duplication and updating effort.
The end result is consistency of information across all sites. "Everything is now streamlined. We have complete control over our websphere" says Usman. "There are no duplicated documents and updates can be applied concurrently across all sites."
Andrew Buckle, describes the council's strategy as 'technology-enabled rather than technology-led'. By enabling the non-technical user and ensuring consistency and integration of content across all sites, this approach is already generating a significant breakthrough in efficiency savings.
"We're deploying Galaxies sites for our councillors now - to enable standards compliant websites and blogs to provide better e-democracy services for our customers" says Andrew.
The next stages of development will also see a rapid growth of personalised sites in all areas of the community. The demand is self-perpetuating because of the success of the initial sites. "Rossendale is making significant leaps in standardising their ECM platform and bringing synergy to their information management strategy - the result is a powerful delivery of what many of us are calling Web 2.0" says Suraj Kika.