Surging govCMS adoption whets appetite for more

Numerous federal agencies and departments are rapidly realising the efficiency and security merits of the govCMS open source web platform.

Surprisingly high demand for the open source web platform service govCMS has revealed strong, latent public sector interest in offloading responsibility for web content, as momentum for digital transformation continues to pick up speed amongst Australia’s government sector.

The govCMS platform, which went live in March 2015, is now (at the time of writing) managing 58 websites for 28 different government agencies including the Department of Human Services, Australian Taxation Office, Department of Social Services, CrimTrac, Australian National Audit Office, National Film and Sound Archive and IP Australia.

That take-up rate, said Acquia General Manager for APAC and Japan Graham Sowden wasn’t expected, in worst-case scenarios, until the end of the service’s third year, but the faster-than-expected uptake suggests that “maybe it hasn’t been as scary as some people thought it would be”.

“There were low, medium and high expectations around take-up and they have really knocked the figures out of the park,” said Sowden. “There has been a real willingness inside many of the agencies, who have wanted to change, as well as inside smaller departments that really didn’t know how to get moving. Just having a standardised template was a major step forward.”

Acquia was chosen by the Department of Finance in September 2014 to provide government agencies with access to the hosted govCMS service, which is a fork of the aGov distribution of the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS) (also used by the US White House).

The template-driven approach was designed to offload the burden of website maintenance as well as to improve the consistency and accessibility of government sites through compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards. It also offloads the burden of back-end system maintenance, provides near-infinite scalability thanks to Acquia’s back-end usage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a hosting platform and ensures that agencies are always running the most up-to-date version of the CMS.

The importance of this last point came into fine focus when, just weeks after the Acquia appointment was made, discovery of a ‘highly critical’ SQL-injection vulnerability in Drupal’s source code sent administrators of the project scrambling to push customers to upgrade. Those administrators were unusually direct in their exhortation that customers “should proceed under the assumption that every Drupal 7 website was compromised unless patched” within the first seven hours after the vulnerability was announced.

Because the hosted-application model involves applying security patches centrally, Acquia has been able to add rapid response to such issues to the benefits of govCMS, whose customers were protected from that and other issues thanks to the structure of the model. This plays right into the strengths of the hosted model, said Sowden: “They’ve seen a swan floating along on the water and they’re grateful that it’s someone else’s feet going madly under the water.”

Indeed, many current govCMS users have spent a lot of their energy on personalisation to suit their own internal service capabilities — which in many cases are being reviewed as part of the digital transformation push being led by the Digital Transformation Office (DTO) (read GTR’s interview with DTO CEO Paul Shetler here).

DTO is also a govCMS user, and expansion of both agencies’ scope is seeing some common elements emerge. In February 2016, for example, govCMS released a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) designed to enable ‘government as an API’ service delivery — and, in so doing, to encourage sharing and re-use of online services between users.

Those APIs will allow govCMS users to integrate content from external sites and systems, with that content normalised inside the shared govCMS using Acquia’s Content Hub technology. Similarly, agencies using the APIs can publish their content to third parties — and push updates to those parties’ sites in real time.

API-based government service delivery is also a core tenet of the DTO’s mission statement, with an API Design Guide floated last August in an attempt to make government services more accessible to third parties. “The gold standard in developer empathy is found in thriving open source projects,” wrote DTO Development Manager Chris Gough in a blog post. “Collaboration, peer review and a responsive community are the hallmarks of such projects.”

As both the govCMS and DTO efforts highlight, government appetite for open source technologies is increasing steadily as agencies push their transformation agendas forward and realise they have little appetite for reinventing the wheel. That fundamental truth was recognised this month when US President Barack Obama floated a draft Federal Source Code policy to “save taxpayer dollars by avoiding duplicative custom software purchases and promote innovation and collaboration across federal agencies”.

That initiative — which built on a 2012 plan for modernisation through the Digital Government Strategy that included an open source-focused developer portal — reflects the growing importance of re-usability to slimming down the cost of government online service delivery. And while Sowden hasn’t yet been given specific savings figures around the adoption of govCMS, he said “we are aware of substantial process savings” from adopters of the platform to date.

With another 16 agencies now in the process of transitioning to the govCMS platform, all signs are that the common environment is continuing to gain in popularity. A newer version of aGov, based on Drupal 8, is currently available in alpha form and will feed new functionality into the Drupal open-source community — some of which could trickle down to future iterations of govCMS, further empowering users who, Sowden believes, will progressively become more aware of the benefits of a hosted CMS instance.

“You will increasingly get more sharing and collaboration by default,” he says. “Sharing content, and establishing a single source of truth, has been difficult in the past because of the complexities of making sure it is always updated. The open API will allow agencies to release information and data that has just been locked away in multiple departments. The future will see a whole lot more sharing, and the openness of that.”

Image courtesy govCMS.