GovCMS — operating a SaaS web platform on behalf of the Commonwealth

Overview

GovCMS’ challenge

When Salsa and amazee.io took over the GovCMS platform in 2018, we were keen to uplift the SaaS offering. GovCMS SaaS helps to deliver consolidation and standardisation across government agencies to decrease fragmentation, inconsistency, maintenance burdens and costs.

GovCMS’ transformation

Since 2018, Salsa and amazee.io have worked across technical solutions, governance and support services to manage the GovCMS SaaS service on a day-to-day basis and implement many program improvements, including both standardisation and feature enhancement.

The outcomes

• A more standardised SaaS offering within GovCMS, to further reduce fragmentation and inconsistency
• Improved/expanded features for out-of-the-box SaaS site builds
• Reduced operational costs per site

Detailed case study

Below is detailed information on the challenge, transformation and final outcomes/benefits.

GovCMS’ challenge — running an SaaS program

GovCMS needed the ability to provide both SaaS and PaaS options under the GovCMS umbrella. When Salsa and amazee.io won the GovCMS contract in 2018, we took over the whole platform, including the SaaS offering. As well as driving platform innovation, our goal was to improve the SaaS offering to give government agencies a better service. GovCMS SaaS helps to deliver consolidation across government agencies, to decrease fragmentation, inconsistency, maintenance burdens and costs.

GovCMS’ transformation — improving the GovCMS SaaS offering

Salsa and amazee.io manage the GovCMS platform, including both SaaS and PaaS sites. Since we took over the platform, we’ve focused on many improvements and innovations. These improvements have standardised and uplifted the SaaS offering.

As part of running GovCMS SaaS, Salsa and amazee.io operate across three main areas:

• Technical solutions
• Governance
• Support services

Technical solutions

Working together, as part of operating the SaaS program we’ve set up and/or managed:

• A more uniform way to provision projects
• A more uniform way to build and deploy projects through Lagoon
• Automated deployments
• Standardised reporting and regulatory adherence processes
• Tooling that helps audit and maintain the SaaS offering
• A standardised release pattern coupled with a strong roadmap that aligns with GovCMS’ needs
• Community guidelines around updates
• A maintenance schedule
• Akamai purge feature for automated cache clearing and self-service cache clearing
• Standardised CI/CD pipelines
• Standardised handling of Drupal configuration (e.g. Redis configuration with fallback)

Governance

Across governance, Salsa and amazee.io work with the GovCMS Change Advisory Board (CAB) to steer and influence the GovCMS roadmap and feature delivery for GovCMS SaaS. Since 2018, we’ve focused on ongoing feature enhancement to broaden the SaaS offering and provide agencies with more options and choices. Security and standardising operations with a goal of reducing total cost of ownership for government websites have also been high priorities for the SaaS offering.

Support services

As part of the SaaS offering, Salsa and amazee.io also set up and run a dedicated GovCMS Service Desk. This Service Desk is an essential part in managing the SaaS program, as it provides support to government agencies on the platform. It uses a standard ticketing process with priority levels and methods of escalation. It’s also backed by a service-level agreement (SLA) with time frames in place for both acknowledging and actioning a ticket depending on its priority level.

The Service Desk is staffed by 16 Salsarians and supported by amazee.io team members.

Our support services for the SaaS program also cover:

• An extensive, online knowledge base for people to self-serve
• In-person training
• Online training
• Training videos

The outcomes — consolidation and standardisation in government

• A more standardised SaaS offering within GovCMS, to further reduce fragmentation and inconsistency
• Improved/expanded features for out-of-the-box SaaS site builds
• Reduced operational costs per site
• Shared feature enhancement (across the whole SaaS platform)
• Improved supportability and maintainability through standardisation

About GovCMS

The Department of Finance (Finance) owns the GovCMS platform, a whole-of-government digital platform for use across all levels of government in Australia. GovCMS is built on Drupal, an award-winning, enterprise-grade CMS that’s easy to use, stable, highly secure and open source (no license fees).