City of Austin, TX€¦ · a bridge toward supporting a more agile, mobile and digitally connected workforce.” Doug Matthews, Chief Communications Director, City of Austin User-journey

How does a city with 13,000 employees provide a better way to communicate with teams, collaborate and share information across 45+ departments? With an intranet that works.

Case study | City of Austin

City of Austin, TX

The problemAfter a resource-intensive, two-year process of building a custom new Drupal website for its residents, the City’s Communications & Public Information Office (CPIO) partnered with the City’s Communications & Technology Management Department (CTM) to explore a more agile and innovative approach to delivering a new City intranet.

Like many cities, Austin had an outdated intranet and various departments running their own systems with different software–creating disjointed user experiences and a governance nightmare.

Employees had long complained about the outdated user experience, dated content and difficulty finding, much less interacting with, the information and services offered through the intranet.

“It was important to us that we not only provided a solution, but we provided one that addressed the long-standing needs and concerns of our employees,” said Doug Matthews, Chief Communications Director for the City.

Behind the scenes, only a handful of employees knew how to administer the 10+ year-old intranet being used, which led to fears that the most minor of updates might result in catastrophic failure of the entire system.

Austin set a lofty goal to procure, design, configure, populate and launch its new intranet in only three weeks. The city’s resident-facing website was also being updated and it was crucial that employees aligned with a strategic plan before the updates took place. With a digital team that was already being stretched thin, a working intranet was vital to communication.

The processAs a resource that touches every employee in the City, the project team was challenged to deliver a quality, high-visibility outcome that would be accessible to employees at every level of the organization. The City invested in research to identify common pain points for City staff, and knew that to be successful, the new intranet must:

Deliver rich functionality such as interactive staff directories, message boards, forms and policy directories, wrapped in a clean, simple and ADA- compliant user interface.

Empower more staff to easily contribute content without learning how to use a CMS, to ensure the intranet could stay fresh and up-to-date.

Deliver a powerful search experience, making it easy to find content, documents and more through a single search box.

Serve as a stable and extensible launching point for employees to access third-party systems and resources critical to their job functions.

Case study | City of Austin

OpenCities’ SolutionThe OpenCities’ intranet solution was evaluated alongside a number of other systems, including custom-built, Microsoft Sharepoint-based, and out-of-the-box platforms.

Following a detailed evaluation and usability testing of their intranet options, Austin’s project team believed OpenCities’ cloud-based, user-tested platform would be the fastest path to deliver a highly functional intranet. Additionally, it could be done without the need for costly and time-consuming custom web development.

In just three weeks, the City of Austin was able to not only design, configure and populate its new intranet, but also achieve full integration with its AzureAD authentication to ensure all 13,000 staff members enjoyed a personalized, single sign-in intranet experience.

To ensure alignment with the City’s brand and strategic direction, employees were able to use OpenCities’ drag & drop design to rapidly create a modern look and feel, entirely consistent with other City design materials and visual assets.

“ OpenCities’ intranet will help ensure consistency in design, helping reinforce the City’s brand and providing our peers a consistent user experience that values their time and makes it easy for them to complete top tasks.”

Yasmin Wagner, Web and Creative Services Corporate Manager, City of Austin.

Case study | City of Austin

The resultToday, Austin’s staff uses their AzureAD login and can securely access the intranet from anywhere on any device, with a secure view of content based on their role within the organization. Employees can also customize their staff listing/profile and soon will be able to engage in forums and discussions to gather input, feedback and ideas from

one another on key citywide initiatives. Combined with OpenCities’ quarterly new feature releases and upgrades, the City of Austin will extend its intranet functionality and deliver more value to staff. City leaders are confident that its new intranet will empower the city to continually innovate based on user experience and employee feedback.

“ Just as we’ve learned that our residents depend on the website for service, our employees depend on the intranet for service. We saw this as not just a modernization of technology, but as a bridge toward supporting a more agile, mobile and digitally connected workforce.”

Doug Matthews, Chief Communications Director, City of Austin

User-journey on Austin’s Intranet, shown on mobile device.

Case study | City of Austin

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