Can technology innovation – coupled with the boldest kind of leadership – work together to start fixing the most intractable problems facing America? On July 21 – we’re going to find out. The countdown to MerITocracy 2022: American Innovation Forum is on.
In the lead-up to the event, we are table-setting a host of big issues that will get serious attention at MerITocracy 2022.
In today’s edition of Countdown to MerITocracy, Maggie Schroeder, Director of Product Marketing at Acquia, talks about the pandemic’s effect on how government needs to reorient its methods to serve citizens, the vital need for government to push citizen service improvements to the top of their priority lists, and how to get there.
The in-person forum – taking place at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, D.C., from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. – will host bipartisan leaders from Congress, the Biden administration, and America’s tech industry to examine the most pressing problems facing citizens in our democracy, and map out creative solutions from the nexus of policy and technology. Register today.
Georgia Technology Authority Taking the Lead on CX Improvements
By Maggie Schroeder, Director of Product Marketing, Acquia
Government agencies at all levels are reinventing citizen services by adopting new practices and technologies that bridge pandemic dislocations. With changing citizen needs and resulting innovation imperatives, leaders across the public and private sector are aiming to hasten their tech-driven journey to better serve customers.
The Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) offers a great example of the citizen service improvement drive is taking off at the state level.
As the digital services agency that services the entire state of Georgia, the GTA team has a lot to keep track of. They’re responsible for Georgia.gov, which serves as the front door to more than 55 state agency websites. But their 10-year-old proprietary platform was becoming too costly to maintain, and they struggled to keep pace with site traffic.
The site had been running two distinct versions of a proprietary content management systems (CMS), one of which was no longer supported. As a result, the technical team spent most of their time making sure the sites were live and servers were functioning. Clearly, it was time for a change.
Rather than host locally as it had in the past, Georgia.gov wanted to leverage the agility and elasticity of the cloud. Traffic to the sites varied according to regular calendar events throughout the year, and Georgia.gov needed to adjust to those changes rapidly. It also needed to onboard additional websites without the hassle of having to provision new servers. And, the new platform needed to be intuitive enough so that content managers and users of all levels could easily manage their individual sites.
GTA teamed up with Acquia to build a platform that provides citizens better access to government information and services.
To meet GTA’s needs, Acquia teamed up with partners to devise a strategy to migrate, rebuild, and redesign the state of Georgia’s outdated CMS, and transform it into a single cohesive system. The team developed a multisite architecture that promotes consistency and flexibility across all agency sites on Acquia Cloud. Through the use of OpenPublic – the open-source Drupal distribution – they were able to migrate content efficiently while creating a custom responsive, mobile-first search application.
Built on top of Drupal – one of the largest open-source projects in the world – Acquia delivers unmatched time-to-market for new websites, an efficient cost of ownership, and a community that helps drive innovation when your agency is ready. Whether you need to deliver a great web-based constituent experience, or a multi-channel personalized experience for anyone who engages with your agency, we can help.
Using Drupal and Acquia Cloud, Georgia.gov launched 55 sites on the Acquia Platform in just 12 months. Officials estimate that the move to Drupal and Acquia Cloud will generate savings of $4.7 million over five years. Along with those savings, the move to Acquia allows Georgia.gov to free itself from managing at least 20 servers.
The success of Georgia.gov is just one example of the power of the Acquia platform to transform the way government agencies of all types and sizes deliver the exceptional digital experiences their constituents expect today.
To learn more about our solutions visit: www.acquia.com