El ‘Department of Transport and Regional Services(DOTARS)’ (http://www.dotars.gov.au) de Australia, algo así como el Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Transportes español, acaba de lanzar su nueva web soportada en Interwoven. Las webs de este Ministerio reciben unos 40.000 hits diarios y unos 75.000 visitantes.
SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 9 / — Interwoven Inc. today announced that the Canberra-based Department of Transport and Regional Services (DOTARS) has gone live with Interwoven. The Australian Government Website now takes a portal approach to the delivery of information — providing tailored information to millions of citizens with smart content enabled by Interwoven MetaTagger software and the Interwoven content management platform.
The main function of DOTARS is to provide policy advice to its ministers and to deliver a variety of Commonwealth Government programs to the citizens of Australia. The Department’s external site sits at the head of 24 public information sites relating to transport and regional development, including the Australian Bicycle Council, Australian Transport Council, and the Sydney Airport Community Forum. Receiving up to 40,000 page hits per day and 75,000 visitors per month, the DOTARS site overhaul was driven primarily by usability and accessibility guidelines published by the W3C along with Australian Commonwealth Government online requirements related to national archives record keeping and security.
Key to the DOTARS pilot phase of the portal initiative, currently in implementation, Interwoven will enable the creation, management, and deployment of content to multiple public departmental sites via one common citizen portal for Transport and Regional Services. Additionally, by unifying the disparate content under one common portal interface, DOTARS ensures a common appearance across all regional divisions.
Prior to the revamp of its main site using software solutions from Interwoven, the Department found its Web operation was not operating as intuitively or efficiently as its owners expected. Previously, the main site consisted of a primitive listing of more than 50 department areas, and required users to first have some knowledge of the information they were looking for in order to know where to navigate to find it.
«DOTARS functions as the central vehicle for accessing these 24 different sites, but prior to the Interwoven implementation, this meant that people coming to the main DOTARS Website wouldn’t necessarily know which area of the Department housed the answer to their questions,» said Dale Minette, director of Online Services for DOTARS. «Essentially, the researcher had to understand the specific functional area of the Department they needed to access before they began their search. As a result, the process was slow and inefficient, and ultimately didn’t adequately serve the needs of our constituents.»
DOTARS has used Interwoven TeamSite and MetaTagger software to create a portal to the sites that fall under the Department’s jurisdiction. The site now features just four main tabs on its new entry point: Transport, Regional Development, Territories of Australia, and Local Government.
«With Interwoven underpinning the new portal, we now have an information architecture, based on subject areas, where citizens can browse without having to know which particular departmental Website has the information they seek. Today a user can go to ‘transport,’ click on ‘transport safety’ and find information without knowing from which of the 24 Websites it originated,» said Mr. Minette.
At this phase of the implementation, three DOTARS sites have made the move to distributed content creation and publishing under pilot projects allowing non-technical users to update site content. The remaining 21 departmental sites, meanwhile, are still manually maintained through one central area conducting HTML mark-up, placement, and publishing. Over the next twelve months, DOTARS hopes to significantly ramp up the availability of the Interwoven solution across the Department so the owners of the individual Websites themselves can manipulate and upload content.
Metatagger
«Because of our extensive experience with government requirements and a deep understanding of DOTARS’ needs in particular, we were able to propose an affordable content management solution that dovetailed with their online strategy,» said Chris Rodowicz, managing director, Interwoven Australia. «When it came to building a content architecture that provided immediate results, in addition to paving the way for a future where DOTARS will be using a great deal of metadata to guide users around its many sites — Interwoven delivered.»
The next step for DOTARS, according to Mr. Minette, is to use MetaTagger to create an environment where individuals visiting the main portal will be able to flag their occupation, such as «pilot,» or interests, such as «transport education,» and only see information relevant to that particular area. MetaTagger makes sure the right content gets to the right person in the right context at the right time.
«Currently we’re at the stage of subject-based navigation, but ultimately we want to graduate to client-focused navigation. And Interwoven’s software is the key: a content management system with easier management and maintenance along with the use of metadata to get the right information in the hands of the right people, while at the same time maximizing our investment in the new portal,» concluded Mr. Minette.
Interwoven Consulting Services and DOTARS: Partnering for Success
From the initial selection of Interwoven in January 2002 through the staged rollout of the content management system underpinning the government portal, Interwoven Consulting Services brought significant expertise and resources that enabled them to architect a solution that met the many business and technical requirements faced by DOTARS.
«The factors critical to our solution success include Interwoven’s understanding of our business, involving Interwoven Consulting Services from the project inception, and investing in our self sufficiency,» noted Mr. Minette. «At all times, Interwoven Consulting Services have shown their commitment to the project by providing vision and continuously interfacing and collaborating with all of our business and technical teams.»