Client: Children's Health System

Client Profile
A large group of hospitals and specialty services aimed at children for:

• Caregiving
• Advocacy
• Research
• Education

Children's Hospital of Wisconsin is a private, independent, not-for-profit, pediatric medical center whose mission is to be one of the nation's premier pediatric hospitals.

Business Issue and Objectives
The I.S. Manager led the Content Management initiative at CHW with following objectives:

• Enrich and Expand content of the existing site
• Distribute authorship across the organization
• Relieve programmers from doing constant up-dates to system. (For example, adjust navigation every time a section is added.)
• Reduce maintenance costs associated with the public web site.

A key aspect of the project was the development of new information and content maintenance architecture. The project also included migrating the existing Children's Hospital web site as well as incorporating a new area with hundreds of pages of Pediatric Health Information. To implement the new site, CHW worked closely with Northwoods Software Development, in order to utilize their extensive content management experience.

Solution
Northwoods Software Development worked with CHS personnel to define their specific business needs and create a realistic schedule. Northwoods designers then worked with CHS to define the navigation and the look and feel of the new site for best usability. The Northwoods Content Management System was then modified to satisfy the CHS requirements. Concurrent activities took place so that the software development happened simultaneously with setting up the hosting sites. Northwoods personnel initially loaded content from the old site and CHS personnel were then trained to use the Content Management tools.

Results and Savings
The results of the project were measured against the original objectives to verify that the goals were achieved. Many of the people who maintain web site content are not computer programmers. They are people who are subject matter experts in their own fields. CHS trained a large group of users to perform their own content maintenance. Fifteen to twenty people are frequent users and as many as forty to fifty are occasional users. Therefore, CHS can now keep the web site up-to-date with fresh content as needed and individual departments can set their own priorities.