Georgia’s Digital Roadmap
GOVTalks recap on maintaining a holistic digital strategy
The State of Georgia launched Digital Services Georgia (DSGa) with the intent to make sure all agencies design and build citizen-centric services. Citizen-centric services are user-friendly, easy to access, and simple.
The role of Digital Services Georgia is to help agencies take a holistic approach to their entire digital presence, rather than considering each website and application as an individual, disconnected unit. When we connect services and present them as a unified offering, we reduce the friction caused when switching between services.
Our Four Tenets
As a web service provider for state agencies and elected officials, we follow these three tenets as our guiding principles:
- Problem first
- People first
- Context first
- Content first
Learn more about these tenets, what they mean for our digital strategy, and how they work together in our full post:
Omnichannel Service Delivery
Digital strategy needs to consider the population that does not use digital channels.
Either by choice or limitations, these people rely only on brick and mortar, in-person, or over-the-phone offerings. Based on Governing.com’s household internet adoption rates data, 20% of Georgia households go without internet. We need to make sure to serve them the same information that we serve our digital channels. Understanding context and planning service delivery around the parameters is a critical part of our digital strategy.
People interact with government across various channels, ranging from in-person to digital assistants.
People interact with state agencies for various reasons, seeking:
- Information — found through websites, call centers, and chats
- Transactions — like registering for a service or renewing a license
They seek these services via channels.
A channel is the medium of interaction between a person and an organization. There are various types of interaction channels, both physical and digital. People access channels based on their comfort levels, access to technology, cost constraints, schedule, and personal preference.
My mom prefers in-person or over-the-phone communication. I prefer communicating via email and transacting online. My kids are already using digital assistants to know more about the world around them.
As an organization we need to ensure people have a consistent experience regardless of the channel they choose to interact with us. When people get conflicting information from different channels, it creates confusion and erodes trust.
Consistency enforces confidence.
We cannot let this experience evolve on its own, so we need to carefully plan, design, and execute it. One of the key offerings of digital services is experience as a service (XaaS).
eXperience as a Service (XaaS)
Experience design is a critical need in the government space.
Private sector has been a leader in implementing experience design for the last two decades. Just think about the big four: Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. I understand if it is hard to accept service offerings around something intangible like experience, but there are tangible and scientific ways to analyze experiential data and enhance the user experience.
Before I dive deeper into experience as a service, I should acknowledge that this new moniker aligns with 3 key IT lexicons identified for cloud computing. XaaS is a new addition to the existing infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS).
Organizations spend a lot of time, effort, and budget on infrastructure, platforms, and applications. While these are the bedrock for services, they leave a gap between applications and users. Organizations hope applications, tools, and vendor partners bridge this experience gap. As an organization, we cannot depend on individual applications to provide a common experience across multiple applications. We need to design for consistency.
We must understand a person’s journey — from education to retention — for how they find out about government services, and how they end up getting their need fulfilled. Without understanding this journey, it is impossible for organizations to provide seamless services.
State Agencies Need to Prioritize Content Strategy
Government web services have a lot of room to catch up to the private sector. One key area where government falls short is content strategy.
In 2002 the State of Georgia launched Georgia.gov, known as the portal. The concept of a portal, made famous by Yahoo!, highlighted the organizational structure and broke information into categories. Georgia.gov followed the “no wrong door” approach, directing users to agency websites serving their needs. While a noble thought, the offering misunderstood how people consumed information. The website was designed with several organizational assumptions without a true content strategy.
In 2012, our team redesigned Georgia.gov. Implementing the content first strategy, the team focused on understanding why people visit the site. The user’s intent was the primary driver and we needed to make sure our content matched and served why people were visiting Georgia.gov.
We implemented the 80/20 rule; also known as the Pareto Principle. More than a rule, it was an observation that 80% of Italy’s wealth belonged to only 20% of the population. A life lesson that not all things in life are not distributed evenly.
While the idea translates well to inform an intent-based content strategy, it is important to know that the 80/20 need not add up to a round 100. Or even that 80/20 could also mean, 60% of your website traffic is consuming 30% of the content. It is a general idea to understand typical distribution.
For content managers who deal with a large amount of varied content, please read: We recommend our agencies follow the 80/20 rule to inform their content strategy. This does not mean they need to delete the other 80% of the content, though I’m sure a good amount of it can go. But the point is to focus on the 20% and make sure it is well written, accessible, and structured.
Georgia’s Enterprise Content Management System is Moving to Drupal 8
For the last 6 years, we have hosted state agency and elected officials’ websites on Drupal 7.
Now, we are planning a new architecture for our future digital publishing platform in Drupal 8 (D8).
While Drupal as a technology stays constant, we will be re-architecting the platform based on citizens’ and agency content managers’ current needs, goals, challenges, and feedback. Usage has changed over the years with newer devices, channels, and expectations, and we have captured a great deal of feedback in the form of a pre-discovery effort.
We have officially kicked off the project as of September, and we aim to have the platform ready for migrations by January 2019.
The D8 roadmap hinges on the following efforts:
- Digital Center of Excellence — DSGa team members are meeting with state agency members and industry experts to update enterprise digital standards and guidelines.
- Modular Procurement and Agile Development — We are creating a pool of vendors who align with DSGa digital standards and can help us with the re-platforming project and additional projects in the future.
Key Findings as We Move Forward
I mentioned earlier that our Drupal 8 project has already begun with citizen and agency content manager discoveries.
Through our citizen discoveries, we’ve learned that people coming to a government website care about:
- Their intent (not how the government is organized)
- The site content (not color schemes, and visual frills)
- A trustworthy, unified message (not individual agency brands)
We are not the same as the private sector. We are not individual agency brands trying to serve our own consumer groups.
We are a combined state, one government addressing various needs. We are one GeorgiaGov serving all people, using both digital and traditional channels. And we’re all in this together.
GOVTalks Video: Be a Part of Georgia’s Digital Future
GOVTalks: The Future of Your Website
See all talks from the event, blog post recaps, and slide decks in our archive page.
An earlier version of this post was originally published December 12, 2017 on the Digital Services Georgia website.
Digital Services Georgia is a nonpartisan division of the Georgia Technology Authority. This publication does not entertain political discussions.
