Overview

Mass.Gov is Massachusetts online face of government providing fast, easy access to information and services provided by the Commonwealth. Our customers, whether residents, businesses, visitors, cities and towns, or public employees, do not need to understand the structure of the government to get things done effectively, although they can navigate by government organization if they prefer. For nearly 10 years, Mass.Gov has successfully organized and aggregated more than 250,000 pages of critical information according to user needs and interests. Mass.Gov, from its inception, has been driven by customer demands, which is the main reason that Mass.Gov's portal is very different from other states in three key areas:

  1. Mass.Gov consolidates information from hundreds of state websites into the main top-level portal,
  2. Most Executive Department agencies are a part of Mass.Gov, as are multiple non-Executive Department agencies, such as the Offices of the Treasurer, Comptroller, and the Attorney General, and
  3. Mass.Gov applies consistent navigation and design across all Mass.Gov sites.

This means that Mass.Gov delivers a simple and familiar user experience to a comprehensive, broad, and deep site.

In addition to delivering a top-notch portal, Mass.Gov

  • provides core infrastructure and technology enabling more than 300 content contributors in dozens of state secretariats and agencies to create and maintain content relatively efficiently, and
  • provides the Commonwealth with a search engine; secure, reliable hosting; and portal disaster recovery.

Mass.Gov receives almost 900,000 visits with about 2.5 million pages viewed per month.

Mass.Gov is managed by the Information Technology Division within the Executive Office for Administration and Finance. A Portal Advisory Board advises Mass.Gov on strategy, policy and priorities and serves as a forum to advocate for enhancements to the Mass.Gov portal. The Board is composed of management and technology leaders from across state government, including the Governor's Office, Office of the Treasurer, Office of the Attorney General, Office of the Comptroller, and Secretariats in the Executive Department.

Mission of the Mass.Gov Office

  • Provide a single online face of government with a common brand identity to all of the Commonwealth's constituencies.
  • Reduce the total cost of government by promoting citizen self-service and enabling state agencies to do more with less.
  • Enable our partners, other state agencies, to empower customers to do anything, anytime, anywhere online with state government.

How does Mass.Gov achieve its mission?

  • Provides a top level portal (www.mass.gov) that organizes government services by customer need, not government structure, and drives traffic to popular online transactions.
  • Provides a simple and familiar user experience by using consistent design and navigation for all agencies who participate in the Mass.Gov portal.
  • Slashes the number of disparate agency websites by migrating them to Mass.Gov and consolidating them into sub-portals.
  • Provides a common web content management platform for more cost-effective, distributed web publishing and freeing developers to work on higher value online transactions.
  • Provides a portal technology platform for quicker, cheaper application development.
  • Breaks down government silos by promoting collaboration between agencies across state government.
  • Promotes adoption of best practices and compliance with enterprise standards (e.g., web accessibility).
  • Provides a secure, reliable, scalable 24x7 web hosting environment (used by over 100 agencies).

Why Mass.Gov?

  • The public, based on its experience with commercial entities, rightly expects to be able to easily do anything, anytime, online with government.
  • Customers should not have to know which agency provides a service, or wrestle with hundreds of different web interfaces and brand identities to access state services.
  • The government must lower the cost of doing business while providing improved service.
  • The web is a cost effective tool to increase citizen involvement with government.
  • It makes no economic or business sense for individual agencies to maintain separate web hosting infrastructures.

Historical underpinnings

Prior to the launch of Mass.Gov, the public had to understand the structure of government, and wrestle with hundreds of different web sites, each with different interfaces and branding, to access thousands of services and pages of content offered by the Commonwealth. In addition, agencies had no common web publishing platform and had varying budgets and staffing to support it. Typically, larger agencies delegated web publishing to centralized teams of technologists, not subject matter experts. Smaller agencies, if they had a web presence, assigned web publishing to lawyers, administrative staff and others lacking technical expertise. As a consequence, websites were either poorly designed and maintained, or relied on expensive coders, graphic designers and dozens of different toolsets. Websites were of uneven quality and content was often not up-to-date or difficult to use.

In early 2001, a 75-member cross-governmental, public-private eGov task force (chaired by then Governor Cellucci and Bob Davis, former CEO of Lycos) developed the E-Gov Strategic Plan which was the vision, strategic intent and conceptual direction for the Commonwealth's eGov future. The Information Technology Division was charged with:

  1. establishing a single online face of government via a user-centered web portal
  2. adopting a more advanced, cost-effective enterprise portal architecture and web publishing platform,
  3. establishing greater access to and visibility existing transactions,
  4. providing direction for agency development of robust interactions and transactions (eApplications), and
  5. developing reusable "shared services" to support common functions across most eApplications (e.g., epayments, identity management, customer relationship management).

The vision resulted in the Mass.Gov portal, publicly launched in May, 2002. Since then, Mass.Gov has undergone three redesigns, each improving usability and access to information and services, the most recent being in October, 2011. This redesign was accompanied by an infrastructure replacement to take advantage of new technologies and was motivated by two key factors:

  • Customer demands: Customers were telling us that they wanted websites that made it easier to find what they wanted and were very readable.
  • Our aging suite of proprietary software: We were hampered in our ability to improve Mass.Gov. The content management platform was highly complex, expensive and very difficult to maintain and enhance. Frustrated content contributors viewed the system as hard to use and it limited their ability to flexibly add video, audio, and other new media types that customers were asking for.

Both internal operational and external customer influences prompted us to investigate opportunities for sound capital investments in tools and technology that would ultimately lead to

  • redesigned websites that address customer needs,
  • improved usability for our customers,
  • less costly, more efficient content publishing that meet current security and continuity requirements,
  • increased usability for content authors across the Commonwealth,
  • increased agility to implement new and enhanced website features in response to the public’s future demands,
  • ability to meet accessibility laws and standards,
  • better, more effective web-based outreach programs to the public, and
  • increased civic engagement.

Successes

Mass.Gov has achieved some remarkable results. Among these are:

Improved customer experience

  • Customer-centric presentation of content: a "front door" to reach all of state government that organizes information and services by topic -- rather than government structure.
  • Consistent user experience across a significant proportion of government sites, using common navigation, presentation, and page layouts. Customers see a "single face of government".
  • Design and layout based on professional, objective usability testing, not opinion or conjecture.
  • Improved findability of key online transactions offered by the Commonwealth through consistent, prominent placement.
  • Simple, recognizable brand: www.mass.gov
  • Equal access for the disabled, through increased compliance with web accessibility standards.
  • Search engine that spans all publicly available Commonwealth sites and subsites.
  • Coordinated, timely emergency web publishing and citizen alerts.

Increased efficiency and reduced costs

  • Improved findability of online transactions and information reduces government costs:
    • Fewer paper forms to process
    • Fewer office visits and phone calls
    • Reduced publication and distribution costs.
  • Improved productivity with streamlined the web publishing process (e.g., Executive Office of Health and Human Services moved from 18 websites supported by 24 FTEs (full-time-equivalent employees) to 1 "subportal" www.mass.gov/eohhs supported by 7 FTEs).
  • Reduced duplication and investment by agencies by using shared infrastructure, tools and expertise.

Continuous improvement

  • Incremental changes focused on customer needs.
  • Steadily increasing collaboration between state agencies.
  • Ability to respond quickly, evaluate, and make enhancements.
  • Visual redesign based on objective, third party usability and accessibility audits.

Strategic benefits

  • Increased adoption of services and better informed citizens help meet social policy objectives.
  • Improved information discovery (e.g. job searches) reduces need for benefits and increases compliance (e.g. business regulations).
  • Increased citizen involvement and participation in government.
  • Greater transparency and improved reputation of government.
  • Increased trust and satisfaction.