National Parks: Case Study of Shared Services, Open Source and Migration
At yesterday's Squiz Seminar, we were lucky enough to host Charlotte Westney, Portal Manager for the Association of National Park Authorities (ANPA). The Association brings together 15 UK National Parks to share services, knowledge and resources in order to cut costs, increase efficiencies and improve services and communication to the public.
Charlotte presented a case study of their project to migrate and rebuild a number of the ANPA's individual park websites. Her insightful talk included great advice on how to make a shared services approach work, why they selected a supported open source vendor (Squiz!) and how they are managing the migration process.
Key Points
Shared Services
- The ANPA is funded from central government and has been hit by budget cuts. This has created a need to achieve more with less - particularly to do more on the web.
- To get each of the 15 national parks involved, there is a choice of membership level (full/half/associate), giving them enough flexibility to pick the level that is right for their requirements and budget.
- The goals of the partnership are achieved by trying to do everything in a standard way, but allowing enough flexibility to accommodate differences where necessary.
- A key cost saving area for the partnership is their hosting. They host all of their websites from their own servers and split the cost between the members. This creates significant cost savings and affords them flexibility to add sites and microsites easily, and at no extra hosting cost.
- Encouraging standards across the association means that work can be shared and costs can be reduced. For example, standardising the format of events information means that the development work for use of that information only needs to be done once, and can be re-used.
- Charlotte pointed out that it is of huge importance that there is a central point of contact in any shared services organisation, This ensures that the decision makers in each of the member organisations, and their requirements, are considered and managed.
The ANPA Web Project: Requirements, Vendor Selection and Migration
- The ANPA kicked off their website rebuild and migration project by considering each of the websites in question, and each of their specific requirements. Some were simple migration projects, keeping the same design and content but transferring it all to a new, common, content management system. Others required a new design, or new content and new design. Additionally, some of the sites also needed to integrate external databases and systems, adding further to the complexity.
- Although there were clear differences between the individual site requirements, there was also a lot of commonality. Many of the sites, for example, were on the same CMS system (Livelink), so development work on migration scripts only needed to be done once, and could then be shared across all of the relevant sites.
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Once the requirements were clarified, the ANPA considered the people who would be using the new system. They created three personas to represent the different types of users across the 15 member organisations:
Each persona had a different level of technical skill and different tasks to complete using the system. This further clarified the requirements that needed to be met by the chosen system. - In selecting the right CMS for their project, the ANPA was especially keen to work with a company that was passionate about the web and had great ideas for innovative uses of new technology. They also considered their 3 user personas, their overall requirements, the total cost of ownership, the ability for future growth and flexibility and risk management.
- The selection process narrowed the choice down to three vendors; one licensed, one open source and one supported open source (Squiz!). Ultimately, Squiz were chosen because they brought the community and cost benefits of open source, along with excellent support and service. Not to mention the passion of the company and the great features of Squiz software.
- The migration of content is a huge task which was made simpler with the help of Squiz. Content was exported as XML from the old sites and mapped to the new sitemaps. Squiz then developed a bespoke import script to migrate the content into Squiz Matrix. The cost of this work could then be split across the ten sites that were using it, making it highly cost effective.
- As the project progresses, Squiz are transferring knowledge to, and training, the ANPA teams. As time goes on, the ANPA are able to do more themselves and each site is getting faster and easier to rebuild.
- Future plans for the partnership include 10 additional website migrations, 5 microsites (with more being added), 8 online shops and the integration of online mapping.
Charlotte Westney Presenting at the Squiz Seminar
Published:
01 Apr 2011 11:20am
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