Stretching our budget dollars to benefit everyone

There is something special about autumn in Melbourne. Crisp mornings, changing leaves and, of course, the annual Victorian State Budget. Not everyone thinks of the budget when autumn rolls around. But as the project manager for the 2019 State Budget website, I will always associate my first batch of minestrone soup with the budget.

The Department of Premier and Cabinet has delivered www.budget.vic.gov.au since 2016. The website helps Victorians understand planned spending where they live and work.

This year we moved the website to Single Digital Presence (SDP). SDP is an open, flexible technical solution that reduces the time and money spent on building websites. It allows government to invest instead in user experience, content creation and innovation.

Getting bang for our buck with SDP

We had a similar amount of money as last year. This year we only spent 30% of our funding on building the new website because the SDP toolkit took care of the rest.

It was a dream not to worry about hosting configuration or building basic functionality. The design process was smooth and speedy because we leveraged the SDP design and atomic pattern library. This saved us money, reduced feedback from stakeholders and provided users with a consistent, tested experience.

What did we spend our money on?

We had to build the website quickly. It also needed extra security features because budget information is top secret until the moment the Treasurer introduces the annual Appropriation Bill to Parliament on budget day.

So, we spent our money on three technical innovations that would benefit the State Budget website right away. The idea is that one day the whole SDP community might benefit as well, once we have set criteria for use by others on the platform.

Automation sensation

We built a custom automation tool which allows SDP to quickly create websites. The previous manual setup took 2 weeks; now it takes 2 hours. We already know it works because we used it to stand up the State Budget Website environment. Then we used it to stand up four more…and counting.

Security +

To better protect budget information during content development, we implemented Two-factor authentication (TFA). With TFA, people have to provide more than a username and password to get in. This makes it harder for the wrong people to get access to our Content Management System.

Lost in translation

We had to balance the access needs of SDP platform developers while minimising the risk of an information security breach. We were able to do this with encrypted content. This meant that content editors with the correct permission could view content and developers could be in the environment, without reading anything!

These technical pieces of work are things you can’t see but they made sure the website was ready in record time and that no budget information security breaches happened before launch.

It shows the impact our dollars can have when we spend them on user experience, content creation and technical innovation instead of spending time on the basics when SDP has already got it sorted. If only SDP could make minestrone soup too.

Credits:

• Department of Treasury and Finance — website content
• Salsa Digital — technical partner
• SDP team — technical delivery