This Australian state government department leads whole-of-government policy and performance, championing digital transformation across the state to improve citizen experience, collaborating closely with other agencies.
“From the outset, DXC approached this engagement with the mindset of providing value for money, ensuring the right skill set, and understanding of the whole scope of work. The team challenged our ideas, assisted us in understanding the impacts of decisions, and went the extra mile to meet our emergency timelines.”
Government spokesperson
Business challenge
Following a state-wide lockdown to mitigate coronavirus transmission, the department needed to ensure businesses could safely re-open and resume providing services to the public.
With a government regulation that businesses must record the details of any person visiting their premises for more than 15 minutes, the department sought to create a solution that was free to use and provided fast and simple user experience to register for unique QR codes through the official state government QR code service.
Several third party, commercial QR code systems had been implemented by the state’s businesses in the preceding months — however not all of these were integrated to the government’s contact tracing system, which hampered contact tracing efforts. The department acted quickly to identify a solution to encourage more businesses to use the official QR code service. This would enable a more consistent data collection method for faster and more effective contact tracing across the state.
The solution needed to ensure citizen privacy and confidentiality with the capability to alert potentially hundreds or thousands of individuals in the event of a COVID-19 outbreak.
Solution
Under emergency measures, the department approved the appointment of Salesforce to build a Business Registration Portal to enable businesses to register quickly and easily, to use the free state government QR code service. As a trusted and highly valued partner of Salesforce, and a proven provider of mission-critical services to government, DXC Technology was selected by Salesforce to deliver the project.
DXC’s Practice for Salesforce, is one of the largest and most experienced Salesforce partners in Australia. Having delivered many strategic, citizen-centric technology projects over the last decade, DXC has a long-standing relationship with Australian state governments.
Working side by side with the department, the fast-paced project involved 15 DXC consultants collaborating to identify the unique business requirements for the Business Registration Portal, which included:
- integration with the state government QR code application,
- broad-ranging mobile and browser compatibility,
- accessibility for people with disabilities,
- optimum security for a sensitive, high profile and confidential emergency measures project.
The team commenced a swift design, configuration and development phase. DXC created the Business Registration Portal on Salesforce Community Cloud, using Lightning communities, Lightning web components, point-to-point integrations, Salesforce standard security with basic authentication, GitHub and the CI/CD solution. Development focused on delivering an intuitive and seamless user experience for businesses to meet government requirements for tracking customer visits and enable more effective public health tracing.
Within two weeks, DXC was able to stand up a fully functioning web portal for an initial pilot with 100 businesses. Following the trial’s success, the solution was rapidly scaled to provide a statewide service over the next two weeks.
DXC built multiple integrations from the Business Registration Portal into existing state government agency systems.
The capability to perform bulk uploads of business identifier and specific location data to meet close contact needs was identified as a requirement by the department. Ian Manovel, government and health consulting partner at DXC explained, “Large sporting events are a case in point. We developed the ability to support bulk uploads of hundreds of locations across a single venue, supporting the generation of unique QR codes to identify people at different locations.”
With the Business Registration Portal fully operational, DXC continued to provide 24/7 secondary help desk support, as well as regular product updates and enhancements over the following months. Enhancements were prioritised by the department and mainly focused on improving accessibility for people with disabilities, with minor refinements to standardise the user experience across different devices and browsers, based on user feedback received through the help desk.
“Reflecting on our efforts, I feel very proud. It’s not often you’re involved in a project that helps save lives and livelihoods. I can’t think of any other project I’ve been part of that has had such an impact. Helping to open up the state and ensure businesses can flourish has a positive and lasting impact.”
Government spokesperson
Results
The department and DXC worked together to deliver a pilot solution in just two weeks and a scaled full solution launch in four weeks. Together they ensured an intuitive design, rapid build, inclusion of critical content, and immediate privacy and policy review. The speed with which steering committee and ministerial approvals were granted as part of the government’s emergency response was critical in achieving timely outcomes.
Providing a fast, easy, free and centralised means for businesses to register for the state government’s QR code service, will significantly improve the government’s visibility of citizen movements, and ability to contact trace in real-time.
Following its launch, registrations on the Business Registration Portal rapidly increased. Overall, there were 49,411 businesses registered by the end of January and 4,520,734 individual QR code check-ins. Within a few months there were over 10 million QR code check-ins by members of the public.
The department commended DXC’s speed of response and depth of Salesforce knowledge to engineer a solution integrating many different systems and platforms within such a short timeframe. The Salesforce platform has delivered the stability and scalability necessary for the department to engage with millions of people quickly and effectively.
A spokesperson at the department said, “From the outset, DXC approached this engagement with the mindset of providing value for money, ensuring the right skill set, and understanding of the whole scope of work. The team challenged our ideas, assisted us in understanding the impacts of decisions, and went the extra mile to meet our emergency timelines. The DXC team members were all a pleasure to partner with.”
“Reflecting on our efforts, I feel very proud. It’s not often you’re involved in a project that helps save lives and livelihoods. I can’t think of any other project I’ve been part of that has had such an impact. Helping to open up the state and ensure businesses can flourish has a positive and lasting impact.”
Government spokesperson
Benefits
Australians value their privacy, however the shared responsibility and pride the nation feels in keeping our community safe means that the public has behaved responsibly using QR codes to keep our country safe from COVID-19. The interconnectedness of the solution and integration with several other systems is what makes it most valuable to the state government.
The spokesperson from the department remarked, “Reflecting on our efforts, I feel very proud. It’s not often you’re involved in a project that helps save lives and livelihoods. I can’t think of any other project I’ve been part of that has had such an impact. Helping to open up the state and ensure businesses can flourish has a positive and lasting impact.”
The nation’s success in controlling the pandemic and the restoration of public confidence in visiting businesses safely can be largely attributed to the government’s efforts to register people’s movements and ensure fast, accurate contact tracing. This project demonstrated how quickly and effectively government can respond to challenges facing the public by collaborating with industry partners.