Adobe and the State of Illinois is partnering on modernizing the state's online presence.
In a joint press release published on Thursday, San Jose-based Adobe and the State of Illinois announced an initiative to modernize the state’s digital experiences for its residents. The project is powered by Adobe’s Experience Cloud and Documents Cloud software in an effort to “create consistent, personalized experiences for residents [that reflect] today’s digital-first economy.”
Illinois noted over 35 state-run websites are running using Experience Cloud applications, with onboarded agencies registering 25% more traffic. In addition, agency sites have reported a 63% increase in accessibility. The latter statistic garnered the state’s Department of Innovation and Technology this year’s NASCIO State IT Recognition Award for what it described as “improved digital accessibility for residents and agency staff with disabilities.” The state also said it sees “substantial traffic” to its sites from mobile devices like smartphones and laptops.
“[The Illinois Department of Innovation and Technology] is committed to building an enterprise-class online experience that helps the State of Illinois provide more equitable access to state services,” said the Department’s assistant secretary, Brandon Ragle, in a statement provided for the press release. “Adobe’s solutions give us the power to quickly unify our state’s digital services so that we can gain a better understanding of our residents’ individual needs and more efficiently deliver critical resources at the right time.”
For Adobe’s part, the company’s VP of strategy and product, Loni Stark, is excited her team can help Illinois (and others) move their online presence further into the 21st century in terms of functionality and inclusivity vis-a-vis better accessibility.
“In today’s digital economy, consumers and residents expect high-quality online experiences that are tailored to their individual needs,” she said in a statement included in this morning’s announcement. “With Adobe technology, the State of Illinois and other [state] governments can accelerate digital modernization and deliver personalized content and experiences at scale.”
In an exclusive interview with me via email, Ragle explained the origins of this initiative began “over six years ago” when his organization investigated content management systems, or CMS. It was a matter of much delicacy, as their heretofore old CMS hosted nearly a hundred public-facing websites.
“Our legacy CMS didn’t provide us with the toolsets needed to develop and maintain modern websites,” Ragle said of his agency’s motivation to upgrade the state’s aging digital infrastructure. “With our legacy [system], we were required to develop numerous custom components which required continual maintenance and hand-coding to deliver features and functionality demanded by our authors. When searching for a replacement system, we focused on solutions with simple authoring interfaces which could be easily expanded with third-party tools and technologies to extend the system. We also desired a cloud-based solution which could scale and adapt to our ever-growing web property base.”
Cloud solutions delivered at scale—that’s Adobe’s modus operandi in a nutshell.
Adobe’s software “ranked very high in our evaluations,” Ragle said. The state has 55 sites migrated onto Adobe’s platforms, with the goal of finalizing the migration by next April. There are 110 sites running on the new system, some of which didn’t run on the legacy software but saw the benefits of the modernized digs.
Expounding upon Adobe’s impressionable evaluations, the choice to ultimately go with Adobe’s technologies came down to—what else?—the pandemic. “The need to get information out to the public in an easily maintainable and accessible manner grew exponentially,” Ragle said. “As more and more physical locations closed, our residents demanded growing functionality and abilities from our public sites. Partnering with Adobe allowed us to quickly meet those challenges and address some other long-standing issues with our most critical websites.”
Beyond accessibility, one of the biggest benefits Illinois reaped by changing its backend technologies is a shifted mindset. To wit, Ragle noted his group was able to successfully get agencies who were more bureaucratically and governmentally inclined to adopt a friendlier, more consumer-focused mentality. This helped all parties involved build websites atop the Adobe systems that were easier to use and, crucially for governmental services, maintain in perpetuity. All told, the reorganization enabled Ragle’s team to create a more seamless experience for the end user, who may not be as technically savvy or hierarchically inclined.
But the new technology isn’t merely a boon for the customer; it’s a big deal for those working internally to deploy the sites as well. The out-of-the-box experience Adobe’s provides for engineers makes their jobs easier than ever before.
“Having a rich dataset includes having location finders, charts, sortable [and] filterable tables and many other components aimed at surfacing information in a user-friendly manner,” Ragle said. “Traditionally, each of these would be one-off developments for each implementation, but working with Adobe, Illinois was able to create reusable components where authors can point to data sources and feed components values creating a complex control onscreen while requiring no developer knowledge from the author. This method reduces our technical barriers for authors and increases both our functionality and accessibility.”
To be sure, accessibility played a pivotal role in this modernization effort by Illinois. At the onset of the pandemic, when the shift to exclusive online business happened seemingly overnight, Ragle and team met with members of the disability community to identify what they needed going forward. The goal was to keep everything as accessible as possible; this way, disabled residents could access mission critical social services from state authorities without interruption.
“We implemented an enterprise website accessibility scanning system that enables us to scan tens of thousands of pages for common accessibility issues on an almost daily basis,” Ragle said. “While there is more to accessibility than any automated tool can test, this is a huge step forward in our ability to improve and maintain the accessibility of state websites.”
Feedback, Ragle said, has been “very positive” thus far. Both the state’s internal metrics and public comments are signaling the current direction is the right one, which Ragle said is encouraging. “Reorienting the sites to be more customer-centric has increased the usability of our sites, removing barriers to information and reducing the friction residents have while browsing them,” he added.
Looking towards the future, Ragle and team have ample reason for optimism and ambition for more enhancements.
“Our legacy CMS had ten years to mature and grow, [whereas] we are about two years into leveraging AEM [Adobe Experience Manager] as our enterprise solution. There are lots of improvements and functionality we would love to see further implemented to make the experience richer and authoring experience easier,” he said. “Once our initial migration is complete, we’re going to look at bringing more functionality to our main state portal [the state’s official website]. We plan on improving experiences by adding additional features such as a statewide calendar with search capabilities and adding additional State service listings. Additionally, we will continue to digitize legacy PDFs and paper forms. Finally, we plan to increase our chatbot reach by expanding them to additional properties, making finding answers to common queries easier than ever.”
