Bio Security Web Application Development and Ongoing Support
GOVERNMENT
SUMMARY
Chamonix partnered with our customer to support engagement with producers and purchasers in the livestock industry. Our customer was seeking ways to increase Bio Security and engaged Chamonix to establish a team to design and build a solution that would record and assess Bio Security best practices. By engaging with the customer to understand their needs and desired outcomes, we were able to assist in the development of a Risk Management tool to increase awareness of and transparency in Bio Security practices. Upon successful completion of the project, Chamonix was retained to provide on-going support and feature enhancement.
KEY CHALLENGES
- Seeking to limit the risk of bio security incidents and reduce the impact when they occur
- Reaching a remote target audience
- Many with limited IT capabilities
- Limited avenues for engagement
- Need to enable a simple way to publish information
- Need to capture some core information about their bio security practices
BACKGROUND
Chamonix was engaged as part of a state wide push to promote and protect South Australia’s strong biosecurity regime across its livestock industries. Producers are encouraged to declare their farm biosecurity status when selling livestock, to improve transparency surrounding livestock transactions and to help producers make informed livestock purchasing decisions. The program will emphasise on-farm biosecurity as the primary focus, based around good biosecurity practices. Producers will also be able to declare their status for a number of endemic diseases specific to their industry, with the first release of the website targeting sheep, beef cattle, and dairy cattle industries. The program and corresponding website functionality must be simple and practical, and not add unnecessary complexity to animal health management programs for producers. Verification measures will also be built in as a part of the program. At the commencement of the engagement the goal was to deliver an online system to allow producers to record and assess their biosecurity practices and share information with other producers and potential purchasers. A key component of that was to ensure that the right questions were asked and answered about the biosecurity practices of the farm of origin and the health status of stock, to minimise the risk of entry and spread of disease.
- Communication challenges as the target audience is remote
- Needed to establish a new channel to enable a higher level of engagement
- Channel needed to enable two-way communication so effectiveness of campaigns could be measured
- Enables inclusion of third parties such as veterinary specialists to assess risks, provide commentary and be involved in any escalations or mitigations
SOLUTION
- Chamonix established a delivery team to work with a phased approach
- We introduced a Discovery, Design, Develop, Operate process
- Our Business Analysts engaged with key stakeholders and sponsors to capture detailed requirements
- Architects worked with the customer’s internal IT team to establish a cloud-based architecture which aligned to customer’s IT landscape
The solution provided a combination of a database web application to house the information recorded for each member and a flexible Content Management System (CMS). This enables the:
- Flexibility of CMS based content management for publishing of biosecurity and disease management practices
- Providing the flexibility to change and improve the information available without having to employ technical experts
- Recording of detailed membership information and interactions for producers, purchasers and third parties
All key requirements were captured and incorporated into the design in the early stages of the program. Research on the higher risk elements of the solution was subsequently undertaken to ensure the solution could effectively integrate with customers systems and that the more complex requirements could be accommodated by the solution. Collaboration between our team and our client’s main stakeholders was a key factor in successfully enabling realisation of the core business outcomes. We selected an iterative approach to the development so the solution could evolve from an initial set of requirements and design outline in the early stage to fully researched solution in later stages. Our stakeholders were included in our daily meetings which enabled finer details to be worked out during the build and testing stages. At the end of each build iteration, we prepared demonstrations of the solution at that point of time. These ‘show and tell’ sessions enabled the customer to view how the solution was forming and to provide valuable feedback to the design and development at the appropriate point in time. To enable a seamless experience across system boundaries the solution was integrated with several of the customer’s existing systems including:
- Identity Management Solution
- Membership Management System
- Location SA
- Centralised Logging
On-going services to our customer included:
- Management and Support
- Monthly Health Checks
- Annual DR tests
- Service Desk
- Service Request Management
- Incident Management
- Problem Management
- Change Request Management
- On-going enhancements
- Annual feature releases
- Maintaining alignment to changing business needs
BUSINESS BENEFITS
- Establishment of an online channel for communication
- Broader reach and connection with Primary Producers
- Increased visibility of practices of Primary Producers
- Automation
- Improved auditing capabilities
- On-going operational management and maintenance
SOLUTIONS & SERVICES
- Application Services
- Web Application
- Integration
- Business Analysis
- Solution Architecture
- Design
- Development
- Cloud Services
