Queensland Department of Housing ‘CMS Feasibility’ Case Study

The Challenge:
Over the past year the Queensland Department of Housing experienced a significant increase in the amount of content and the rate of change in the intranet and internet sites. Pages are constantly being created to support new projects, policies, and initiatives within the department.

Intranet usage has also increased rapidly with users registering over 450% more hits than for the same period last year. Web site-content, is managed by the department’s Marketing and Communication group.

The promotion of the web as an important communication and information-sharing tool has increased the level of awareness, which resulted in a greater demand for support services.

The Department of Housing’s key requirements for a content management system includes; an integrated authoring environment, the separation of content from presentation, version control and archiving and workflow.

The Solution:
The Department of Housing sought assistance to build a business case that defined the business value of implementing a Content Management System. The feasibility study needed to provide direct input to this case through the provision of a consulting methodology that identified the departments’ current situation, business needs and offered alternate future directions.




IDEAS! solution provided for a situation analysis of the departments current environment. This was achieved through conducting interviews with stakeholders in Marketing and Communications, the Web Services group and facilitating a workshop with the Internet / Intranet working-group. We analysed the current web publishing processes and identified areas of improvement, as well as gathered reporting and statistical information.

IDEAS! methodology ensured that we leveraged our industry research and knowledge, and included appropriate trends and influences from the market place. Our research included investigating the departments’ relationship to the broader Queensland government objectives and initiatives for online service delivery.

The feasibility study identified several possible strategic solutions for the evolution of the departments’ content managed environment. This study took into account such influencing factors as e-learning, collaborative communities and shared knowledge, and offers appropriate recommendations along with implementation and costing details.

A key deliverable of the feasibility study was to provide a Return On Investment analysis to support the business case.