Case Study: Health Care WCMs Implementation

The Problem

You know that nostalgic feeling you get when you see a '70s movie. That's how you could describe the public website for a large hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area. The web aesthetics had moved on, and it was time for the website to catch up. The advertising agency chosen for the project replaced the 30-70-two-column fixed layouts with beautiful pictures, parallax scrolling, fluid and responsive designs to support mobile, tablet and desktop browsers. The web authoring tools had evolved as well. The hospital needed a set of tools to manage content on the site rapidly, author content easily and merge large amounts of content without much effort.

The Solution

The advertising agency responsible for the brand and site redesign engaged members of this team to handle the technical implementation. Working in an agile fashion, the technical team not only completed the website but also contributed in key ways to the overall success of the site.

Guided Client and Creative Team: Because we were embedded into the process from the wire frames stage, we advocated for a component based design and helped the creative team develop a vocabulary of modules that were not only pleasing but also reusable in other parts of the site. The client also realized the speed and flexibility this would give them when adapting the site later on. The whole site was developed on top of HP Autonomy Teamsite using seven layouts and approximately 30 components. Component based design may not sound like a big deal, until you add a module to a page in five minutes completely changing the page's functionality - without any IT/IS help.

Integrated with External Systems: In a first for the industry, the site featured a powerful faceted search solution. With one search box, a user would retrieve Doctors, Locations, Library Articles, Calendar Events and web pages matching their search term. Most of the data for the search results was external to the CMS system, yet it needed to be managed and appear as one data set. Doctors were imported from a corporate compliance and credentialing database; library articles were retrieved from Krames Staywell and calendar events from Certain Inc. The key enabler for merging all this data, was a common taxonomy consistently applied to each data type upon ingestion into the CMS system via HP Autonomy Teamsite Workflow engine.

Trained Customer Continuously: We involved the customer early in the design of the authoring tools. The client was able to use the forms, components, and layouts early on in the process which helped us improve and simplify the authoring tools considerably. We not only held formal training courses, but also sat with the client side by side and walked through the authoring process and recorded videos for the key business workflows. This level of transparency and involvement is a key differentiator in how we support our clients.

The Outcome

Modern: We achieved the promise of fluid responsive design. The site worked flawlessly on desktops, tablets and phones from one single code base.

Agile: We created an agile platform where business users can routinely publish content and change page composition without intervention from IT/IS. No longer did the pages need to be re-generated, or pushed en-mass. Users could create pages, add content and publish entire new portions of the site any time. Content, like calendar and doctor's records flowed automatically from their systems of record; while large amounts of library articles were imported occasionally and automatically formatted with just a few clicks.

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