Sharyn Clarkson at DrupalSouth 2022
Sharyn started by looking at some of the GovCMS platform stats from the pandemic, highlighting key metrics of:
- 187,000 concurrent users at a time (April 2020)
- 2 billion server hits (March 2020)
These were the types of numbers GovCMS was expecting in 8-10 years’ time, not in 2020. She said that the numbers were actually so high, they wondered if it was a DDOS attack or if Google Analytics was broken! But of course it wasn’t.
Sharyn explained that when you run a big platform like GovCMS, you have a backlog of hundreds of items that you’d like to improve on. But when the traffic suddenly increases that much, then you need to focus on scaling. And so, the more strategic roadmap was put on hold while GovCMS, Salsa, amazee.io, Akamai and AWS worked through the backlog.
Sharyn also noted that although they had a big spike during the height of COVID, GovCMS traffic today is still higher than pre-COVID. She said this indicates people are accessing more services online.
While the focus was on BAU, there were also improvements happening, such as adding the Akamai purge service and moving from OpenShit to EKS on Amazon. The two other big projects were moving sites from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 and starting to help agencies on Drupal 7 prepare for the move to Drupal 9.
The GovCMS Roadmap
GovCMS’ focus went back onto the roadmap around June 2022. The first step was putting out an expression of interest for digital experience platform (DXP) tools.
The roadmap has five main focus areas:
- Enabling complex personalised user journeys
- Making content shareable and reusable
- Enabling 3rd party content delivery
- Design consistency
- Fixing structural gaps
Enabling complex personalised user journeys
Sharyn’s end goal for GovCMS is to enable complex user journeys. She described complex user journeys as when people have multiple life events or issues going on at the same time. Sharyn’s vision is for GovCMS to deliver complex user journeys that bring together different facets from everyone's life all at once. She acknowledged this might take 2 years, 5 years, or even 10 years.
Making content shareable and reusable
While GovCMS already features content syndication, the focus is on delivering this in a more sophisticated way. Often in government different agencies deal with the same/similar things. Going forward, Sharyn is keen to see government using content from a central repository so multiple departments are drawing on the same content that’s current and accurate.
Enabling 3rd-party content delivery
Enabling 3rd-party content delivery is a dream of Sharon’s. Specifically, she’s talking about getting important government content into non-government websites where target audiences are during specific life events. For example, during pregnancy, women might not actively seek government websites until perhaps month seven, when they’re looking for information on maternity leave. But there is a lot of key government information that needs to get to them sooner. Channelling that government information into a more mainstream pregnancy website will help ensure women receive that content. This is just one example of many.
Design consistency
Next, Sharyn spoke about design consistency. She said that while many site owners want their websites to look unique and special, consistency is actually key. And consistency not just across colour and typeface but across components such as what call-to-action buttons look like and where they’re placed. Government had been working towards that with the Australian Government Design System. Sharyn said GovCMS was disappointed to see the AGDS finish, but said they were:
“Absolutely delighted to see CivicTheme, which is actually taking that work and taking it forward and truly open sourcing it and making it available to far more than the Australian Government. GovCMS is fully committed to CivicTheme and will start to bring it into GovCMS more and more.”
Sharyn encouraged the community to start using .
Fixing structural gaps
The final roadmap element Sharyn spoke about was fixing structural gaps, such as the lack of editorial control in the backend. Work in this area will include extending the user journey mapping that’s happening with myGov to go beyond transactions and to make sure user journeys are cross jurisdictional. These base user journeys need to be completed before the complex user journeys can be mapped.
GovCMS right now
In terms of right now, Sharyn said there are several things that GovCMS has started working on. They are:
Personalisation — GovCMS is about to issue a request for proposal (RFP) building on the expression of interest (EOI) around personalisation and the 4 proof of concepts that GovCMS commissioned in July 2022. By 2023, GovCMS will have digital experience platforms (DXPs) available to all GovCMS agencies as a separate section under the Drupal Services Panel, to make it much easier to procure. GovCMS is moving rapidly into much greater sophistication and to enable a wider set of tools.
Rules as Code — Sharyn said Rules as Code was demonstrated at a recent GovCMS community showcase and the community was extremely excited about it. She referenced Pia Andrews as a passionate RaC advocate and reiterated that RaC can solve a lot of problems for people in government. Note: Salsa built this RaC PoC, which looked at rules around COVID vaccinations. Watch video overview of the RaC COVID
Single sign-on (SSO) — GovCMS has started work on single sign-on. They have a partner and an agency ready to go as the first project.
APIs — GovCMS sees a big movement towards headless and DXP tools. With that will come an explosion in APIs, so this is also a space GovCMS is working in.
CivicTheme — Referenced above.
Content anywhere — Also, already touched on and something Sharyn will be taking a particular interest in.
Open source and Drupal as the CMS
Sharyn reiterated her commitment to open source and the original vision of building GovCMS on an open source community for sharing and re-use. She stressed that open source is fundamental to the culture change GovCMS has brought to digital and to government.
She also emphasised the commitment to Drupal. She said all the reasons she chose Drupal in the first place still stand, and in fact the Drupal community is now even larger and more mature in terms of enterprise delivery. So there’ll be no change in Drupal as the CMS for GovCMS.
Stats and timeline
Sharyn finished up with some stats and a summary timeline of GovCMS.
The key stats were:
- 348 live sites
- 105 organisations using GovCMS
- 57 sites in development (with a signed MOU and work actively begun on the website)
- Very strong pipeline (GovCMS pipeline is usually about 200-600 sites)
In terms of the timeline, key dates Sharyn touched on were:
- 2015: Launch
- 2016: IPPA Award win
- 2017: Drupal Services Panel established
- 2018: Moved to Salsa and amazee.io (and Kubernetes)
- 2019: 300th site built on the platform
- 2020: 100th agency joined the platform
- 2021: Changing infrastructure (moved to EKS)
- 2022: Started the DXP journey
Looking forward, Sharyn is anticipating 2023 to be another busy year with DXP integrations, Rules as Code and SSO. She also sees more agencies will be building headless. And finally, with the focus on design consistency there will be a growing need for content specialists and designers.
Salsa Digital’s take
We’re honoured to play such a strong role in GovCMS’ past and future and be the current delivery partner. We’re keen to help GovCMS realise its vision across all roadmap items and will be playing a key role in many areas. Salsa is leading the Rules as Code movement here in Australia, having recently completed a Rules as Code PoC for GovCMS and through our heavy involvement with the RaC project for the Digital Aotearoa Collective. We’ve also spent over 3000 hours (to date) building CivicTheme as an open source product for everyone to use. We were thrilled to hear that CivicTheme forms part of GovCMS’ formal roadmap and is a key tool for design consistency across the platform going forward.
You can view Sharyn’s full presentation below: