Natural selection
Natural selection
Jul 01, 2005: How the Queensland Government is leveraging technology to help protect the state's natural resources.
The Queensland Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy (DNRM&E) works closely with other government agencies, industry and the general community to develop and implement programs to achieve common goals for the management and maintenance of Queensland's natural resources.
As access to information is vital for the successful management of natural resources, the Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy (DNRM&E) has turned to web content management to better inform the public about natural resources by managing its huge store of online information.
As its name suggests, the department's responsibilities include managing and maintaining land, water, vegetation, mineral and energy resources throughout the state, and administering land and other titles. To do this, it works closely with stakeholders, other government agencies, industry and the general community to develop and implement the programs necessary for achieving these common goals.
To date, one of the department's biggest challenges has been managing the vast amount of information it produces, and ensuring its fast and accurate delivery to users throughout Queensland. A brief snapshot of the state will serve to put this task in context.
While it may be only the second largest of the Australian states, Queensland has the largest habitable area. Encompassing 1,727, 200 square kilometres, it is equivalent in size to the British Isles plus the whole of Western Europe. The capital, Brisbane, and the surrounding urban areas account for over half the entire state population of about four million residents, while 90 percent of the remainder live in a further eight towns. Vast fertile areas include huge agricultural and farming stations, mine sites and remote aboriginal settlements.
In association with other state and federal departments, industry bodies and community groups, DNRM&E produces hundreds of thousands of documents, forms and media copy. These include astronomical data, land sales data, court certificates, maps for mining and land use, digital data from titles and surveys, aerial photographs, explosives licences, vegetation and weed control information, and water supply applications.
All the information supplied must be accurate, timely, and readily accessible to the community. While research undertaken in 2002 demonstrated that phone and written correspondence were still the preferred means of stakeholder communication with the department, it also highlighted the emerging importance of electronic communication in stakeholder dealings and, in particular, the importance of the departmental website.
The study revealed that 88 percent of all stakeholders had Internet access, four percent were planning to have access in the next 12 months, and 62 percent had accessed the NRM&E website in the previous 12 months.
It was evident that the time had come to move from a culture of using the web as a repository for information produced, to one of providing customers with the information they were looking for, in the way they wanted to look for it. This would encourage community self-service and save time and money for the state.
The department realised that to manage this enormous volume of information effectively and deliver it in a timely way to the community, it needed a powerful, enterprise-wide website capable of doing this 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
An important part of the strategy was to enable business areas to be able to update their content quickly and easily without the need for technical web development skills, or the necessity of passing their work on to others with those skills.
When the department started looking at web content management solutions in 2002, these issues were uppermost in the web team's mind. After carefully evaluating the market in a whole-of-government tender process, they recommended Interwoven TeamSite web content management software. A successful pilot test program was started in 2002 with 50 content contributors. A further 250 licences are now being rolled out.
The first priority was to use TeamSite to develop a standard 'look and feel' template to make the DNRM&E website consistent with those of other Queensland government departments by having the same logos, search buttons and navigation mechanisms. The workflow process created enables licensed users to create standard content that goes through an approval and quality assurance process before publication. By freeing authors from responsibility for the technical processes prerequisite to online publication, this has enabled them to focus on the quality of their content.
Many business groups are now responsible for updating their own content. The workflow tools have streamlined the approval process, and contributors can be confident that their material is standards compliant. Accurate and relevant material is being delivered to users more quickly. Previously, content could easily take two weeks to work to the top of the web team's job queue - now same day publication is the norm.
DNRM&E is committed to the Queensland Government's 'Access Queensland' initiative to ensure the availability of government products and services anywhere, any time, through a variety of channels. To achieve this, it is shifting its focus toward creating material that can be inexpensively delivered online, taking account of the fact that many of its users have older computers and dial-up connections.
Since the department's site was redeveloped within Interwoven TeamSite, web traffic has increased by approximately 50 percent, suggesting that users of the site are seeing it as an increasingly valuable resource.
With phase one of its rollout complete, DNRM&E has entered the second stage of the project, making the system more widely available throughout the department. Migration of the departmental intranet to TeamSite is also well underway. This is a real boon for regional infrastructure as it frees these areas from the many technical and business tasks involved in maintaining their separate intranets on local servers, and keeping these sites up-to-date. They can now easily publish their own content on the department's main intranet site, while still keeping it relevant and accessible.
Having an effective web content management system has been critical for the department in managing its information resources more effectively, and making these resources more accessible to the public. With the mechanics of implementing and rolling out such a system almost complete, the department is focusing more on the quality of its content to make sure that the full potential of its website is realised.
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