Department of Justice readies for G2C engagement

The Department of Justice is one of eleven departments within the Victorian public sector. The Justice portfolio consists of business units and statutory entities aligned under nine key functions. This includes all police and prosecution functions, administration of the court system, provision of the prison and community corrections services, administration of various tribunals and agencies established to protect citizens' rights, emergency management, provision of emergency services, policy on racing and gaming issues and the provision of legal advice to government.

The Justice portfolio employs over 21,000 staff and enjoys the support of around 90,000 volunteers across areas such as Country Fire Authority, Lifesaving Victoria, Victoria State Emergency Service and Office of the Public Advocate.

Supporting online strategies
Department of Justice’s intranet had become dated, difficult to manage and poorly organised. It was struggling to provide the right information in an engaging manner, resulting in a low level of usage.

The Department had developed an Online Strategy Programme with the key business outcomes of:

• Enabling more effective social networking, citizen engagement and collaboration with the community
• Providing rich Internet applications for the community—information and services that are more personalised, faster, easier to use and able to be delivered through multiple channels (such as Internet and phone)
• Enabling effective collaboration and teamwork — especially among disparate teams and across agencies
• Delivering a presentation development tool to internal staff that offers higher productivity than the Web alone can provide

However, it saw that its existing intranet was not going to be able to support its Online Strategy Programme in its goal of driving connections and collaboration between users across its wide range of portfolio areas.

According to Pat McCormick, General Manager Online Collaboration & Citizen Engagement for the Department of Justice, “We needed our intranet to become a single source of truth and positive experience for our internal users. Plus we saw it as key to encouraging and supporting communication and collaboration across the department's operational divisions and business areas.”

A project to create a new intranet was determined as the first step in successfully establishing these internal initiatives. The resultant platform would then provide a proof point for ongoing deployment of the Department’s overall online strategy for enhancing engagement with Victorian citizens.

Streamlining content management
The Department selected IBM Business Partner* Certus Solutions as its partner of choice, based on its deep technical and practical expertise in the areas of Web Content Manager and, in particular, the IBM WebSphere range of technologies.

Certus was initially engaged to prove the technology through a pilot of IBM Web Content Manager Version 7, soon after its public release. It recommended a Cloud Development environment – to provide a flexible and agile development environment whilst the Department determined the best data centre location for its production environment.

Specialist consultants from Certus began working with the Department’s business users in late 2010 to understand and establish a Web Content Manager authoring process. The objective was to streamline internal processes to ensure non-technical content authors and approvers could more easily publish pertinent content to intranet users.

Need for speed
Certus went on to assist with the larger-scale intranet project, which was based on IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Manager, capable of delivering a robust and scalable platform to support the Department’s approximately 7,000 intranet users.

The Department set an aggressive six-to-nine month timeframe for project delivery from design to production. Certus determined that a Waterfall development methodology would take too long. An agile approach would accommodate engagement with business owners, technical resource and problem solving on the fly in order to keep the project moving and progressing. Agile methodology also enabled rules and decisions to be changed along the way, as the detailed business requirements were specified and further requirements identified.

Development in Amazon’s EC2 cloud also helped reduce time to production, by offering a cost effective, scalable and flexible environment taking less time to get up and running than a traditional software development environment. The Department did not need to provision development systems, but could access the processor power and storage they needed on demand. This was a first, and Certus worked closely with the IT team to ensure government security and risk polices were met.

Putting users at the forefront
The new intranet puts users at the forefront. It includes innovations such as a ‘Person Card’ and ‘People Search’, which enable Social integration and collaboration with peers across departmental units including police, courts, prisons, emergency services, regulation of gaming, racing, liquor licensing and trade measurement, and victims’ services.

Other user-focused innovations delivered by the Department’s new intranet include:

• Blogging, never previously allowed in a ‘public forum’
• Highly customised workflows which ensure rapid content publishing
• Integration of contact information with the Rosetta feature of the Department’s IBM Lotus® Notes® system

The intranet also integrates and complies with the Department’s records management system (TRIM), by driving users to provide links to information sources, rather than uploading attachments. In this way, it reduces the risks of data being duplicated, intranet documents becoming outdated and unreliable – with false information being held in multiple places.

A platform for the future
The intranet went live in September 2011, and the Department is seeing productivity gains across all groups. Users are finding completion of tasks, information gathering and searching of departmental data significantly easier, faster and more reliable.

Among the business benefits it delivers the Department of Justice and its users are:

• A more collaborative working environment
• Improved communications between traditionally siloed departments
• Bringing security and IT together, with blogging opening up a means of explaining to the general population why particular processes and procedures are required
• Greater compliance with information governance, auditability and User Accessibility standards

As Pat McCormick says, “We now have a platform for the future that provides an opportunity to deploy digital and social media tools and communications as technology and our needs evolve.”


About Certus
Certus is Australasia’s largest specialist IBM software and infrastructure services company, with around 160 highly skilled professionals in seven city centres, supporting Tivoli, WebSphere, Information Management, Lotus and Rational. Certus’ 500 customers include some of the largest IBM users in Australia and New Zealand.

About IBM Collaboration Solutions

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IBM social collaboration solutions can help your business become a social business. Let IBM help you connect your employees, customers and partners so they can share their knowledge and expertise to improve and accelerate the pace of business and deliver unprecedented return for the time invested

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