The Situation
When the Kāpiti Coast District Council went to the market to replace its ageing internet, they weighted their decision as much on the way a potential partner understood the environment within a District Council and the way business processes work, as on the product that could fulfill their wish list.
Kāpiti Coast District Council Business Analyst Marcus Bone says: “In a rigorous RFP process, a lot of companies talked of “all the wonderful things we could do,” but few demonstrated that they knew how a Council works or had a real understanding of local government requirements.
“Intergen had a real level of professionalism about them, and had good experience across many council and local government websites. They understood the wish list from our many business units, but also understood the practical implementation of it, and what really mattered for our business processes.”
The Pain
The existing internet had run its course; it was outdated and unsupported, low on interaction and didn’t allow the Kāpiti Coast District Council to share information in a structured or streamlined way.
We built a website and built better business processes with it.
The Kāpiti Coast District Council (KCDC) took an intentional strategy of involving many stakeholders within the Council to reflect the business-wide needs of the organisation. Marcus Bone comments:
“The internet became an excellent driver for building processes and procedures about how and why we used information. It gave us a structure that we didn’t have before and actually drew out more information from the organisation in a more easily reached way for our customers.
“It gives us the chance to be interactive as well – before if we wanted to do something exciting, we had to build something with a third party and provide a link to it from the website.”
Knowledge is also something that has grown within the KCDC. A working knowledge of how to use the existing internet rested in the hands of a couple of people, and content was infrequently updated as a result. Now over 25 people from a staff of 250 are using the internet and training is bringing on more contributors at speed because the EPiServer product is so easy to use. With the key priorities ticked off, the KCDC is now viewing more interactivity including creating forums and consultation spaces.
“EPiServer gives you so much in terms of out of the box functions that we were able to achieve what we wanted to do at a price that fitted our organisation. Here was an option that was cheaper, yet still had all the functionality we needed in terms of good content management with the opportunity to grow it.” Marcus Bone.
On time and on budget
A wish list, by definition, will always take a degree of prioritising. According to Marcus Bone, the value of having Intergen onboard was that it was a friendly open partnership.
“We enjoyed the experience of working with Intergen. They have great project management skills, always talk through what they’re doing, and they have provided excellent ongoing support.
“The best way of indicating that the new internet has been a success is because we now want to publish, we want to be in front of our customers, and we want to go on from here to become more interactive.”
The Gain
A good internet site is not an island of information.
It’s about delivering good customer service from information that’s relevant and reachable.