Guidelines for Adopting and Supporting the CMS Portal Strategy

The following guidelines provide the basis for adopting and supporting the CMS Portal Strategy. Stakeholders responsible for each CMS portal and for CMS portal content should align their tactical planning and designs with these guidelines.

Address All Four Perspectives of the Portal Strategy

To be comprehensive, tactical planning for a portal must address four distinct perspectives, as explained in the tableTable - Four Portal Strategy Perspectives.

Table - Four Portal Strategy Perspectives

Perspective

Relevant Goals and Objectives

User / Consumer:

Concerned with providing portal users with a
high-quality user experience. Scope includes:

  • User awareness of the portal

  • CMS branding and style

  • Navigation, enterprise search, and collaboration features

  • User support and self-service capabilities

  • Accessibility and client device support

  • Provide intuitive, continuous customer interaction directly through one high-impact channel, promoted and identified by a single agency brand

  • Support role-based contextual services and information filtering, collaboration within and outside the agency, and self-service for customers, employees, and partners

  • Enable users to find relevant information more quickly and, through collaboration, to leverage collective experience

Information:

Concerned with ensuring that each portal delivers information and services that are understandable, locatable, complete, and relevant to the portal’s community of users. Scope includes:

  • Management of user communities

  • Alignment of content and services to user communities

  • Manner in which content is described and presented to users

  • Management of web content, including its creation, management, storage, and deployment

Links directly to CMS’s mission and goals:

  • Align with the CMS Business Reference Model to classify audiences and Communities of Interest

  • Reduce the complexity of service-providing processes

Data:

Concerned with using CMS’s authoritative data sources to deliver data-driven content and services that are current, consistent, understood, and high-quality. Scope includes:

  • Standardizing access to CMS’s authoritative data sources

  • Supporting harmonization with other data sources across healthcare and government domains

  • Align with the CMS Shared Services Strategy for leveraging applications and services

  • Continuously ensure that content and services accessed through portals and managed across government organizational boundaries are protected and available

Application:

Concerned with integrating CMS applications with the portal environment. Scope includes:

  • Reference architectures for portal systems and frameworks

  • Standards for portlets, web services, and other portal-related application interfaces

  • Utility functions that portal systems provide for applications (i.e., user authentication, session management, content rendering, navigation, layout, and logging)

  • Improve internal business agility to more rapidly respond to changing demands

  • Deliver new critical mission capabilities more quickly and with less cost by minimizing IT rework, alleviating duplicate efforts, and sharing a single infrastructure

  • Continuously ensure that content and services accessed through portals and managed across government organizational boundaries are protected and available

Address the Processes Associated with Portals

Effective tactical planning for a portal must address two broad categories of portal-related processes: Management Processes and Operational Processes. The following describes these at a high level. While some processes will be managed centrally, others may be completely decentralized to maximize efficiency.

Management Processes

Management processes define decision-making practices, establish goal and performance metrics, oversee portal strategy and prioritization, report on portal success, and define and establish policies and standards. Management processes consist of:

  • Strategy Setting and Prioritization – Establishes portal goals and objectives, investigates portal development opportunities and areas of focus, and prioritizes initiatives.

  • Performance Management – Defines measurement objectives, develops a measurement approach, defines measurement categories, identifies indicators and metrics, and collects and reports data.

  • Policy and Standard Setting – Identifies and revises policies and standards around portal development, content creation, and presentation.

Operational Processes

Operational processes involve the daily activities and operations supporting the portal as follows:

  • Web Content Management – Includes content generation, review, translation, testing, posting, quality control, archiving, and appropriate updating.

  • Operations – Includes determining portal production requirements, identifying system monitoring requirements, developing security management approaches, defining service level agreements, conducting system quality control, and managing change requests.

  • Feature Request Management – Captures and assesses requests for offering new services or tools through the portal. Centralizing this process allows for proper prioritization, coordination, and budgeting. Implementing a request management process also avoids unnecessary duplication and enables economies of scale.

  • Continuous Improvement – Includes collecting stakeholder and user feedback, conducting portal reviews, identifying improvement areas, assessing new technologies, and recommending areas for site development.

  • Quality Control – Establishes a validation process for content accuracy and relevance before publishing and a site monitoring process for flagging content for revision.

Address the Roles of Stakeholders

Tactical planning for CMS portals should address the roles and needs of the following major stakeholder roles:

  • User Communities. The user communities served by a given portal are the ultimate judges of how well the portal’s design, content, and accessibility meet their needs. Effective tactical planning for a portal also includes user awareness, training, assessment, and feedback mechanisms.

  • Portal Business Owner. The overall business lead for a given portal is responsible for coordinating that portal’s design and operations, authorizing the portal’s users, and ensuring that the portal’s content and services are relevant and friendly to the user community. Portal owners require guidance, governance, and assessment tools necessary to fulfill their responsibilities and make their portal successful.

  • Web Content Management Teams. Skilled staff or contractors are responsible for technical administration, design, content maintenance, and content workflow of a given WCMS as well as for providing technical design and implementation support to all portals using that WCMS. This team may also be responsible for providing user training.

  • Web Content and Service Suppliers. Individuals and business units supplying content to portals, or operating services and web applications offered to users through portals, are responsible for their data and content quality, user authorization, and implementation of role-based access control (RBAC) within a portal service.

  • Portal System Owner and Maintainer. This is the business owner responsible for a given portal system that hosts one or more portals.

Employ a System of Governance

The CMS Portal program will apply the CMS Integrated IT Investment and System Life-Cycle Framework and other Agency governance processes to portals, portal systems, and portal frameworks. Portals, portal systems, and WCMSs will all follow the CMS ILC as separate projects. Portlets and web services are components of business applications and therefore will follow the CMS ILC and Business Service Management life cycles as part of their associated business application project.