The Organization

With roots dating back to 1887, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is the state's only health and research university. OHSU provides world-renowned educational services through its five schools, including the Schools of Medicine, Nursing, Dentistry, Science & Engineering, and Pharmacy.

As a leader in research, OHSU serves as a catalyst for the region's bioscience industry; and is an incubator of discovery, averaging one new breakthrough or innovation every three days—many of which open new markets and spin-off businesses.

OHSU also is a key economic and social force in the Pacific Northwest. With an annual budget of $1.4 billion and more than 12,400 employees, OHSU is Portland's largest, and the state's fourth largest employer (excluding government).

The Situation
In 2003, OHSU consisted of two separately operating organizations—Healthcare and Education—with two separately managed and branded websites. No content management solution was in place for either. With more than 400 content owners and 100 people who contributed code independently, the websites were "unsupervised playgrounds" that grew organically rather than strategically. OHSU had 28 public-facing domains at the time with 60,000 pages of disorganized content—and no site governance tospeak of.

The Solution: Take 1—Implementation Pilot

Enabling Users & Taking Control of the Brand
The OHSU Web team chose CommonSpot initially as a proof-of-concept pilot for only ten of its 28 domains. The organization's needs were simple: they were looking to standardize the header and footer, and enable non-technical users to author and contribute content. However once word spread of CommonSpot, the scope of the initial project grew exponentially.

"PaperThin held a 30 minute demonstration for content contributors and wowed the group with the system's ease of use and how quickly users could publish content. It was so wildly popular that everyone wanted to be a part of the pilot—the waiting list was huge."
Renee McKechnie, Senior Web Engineer of OHSU

Before the Web team knew it, CommonSpot was being rolled out enterprise wide, and the benefits were quick to reveal themselves. CommonSpot's inherent ease of use enabled non-technical users to contribute content with little more than an hour of training. OHSU leveraged CommonSpot's template architecture to lock in the header and footer designs across both organizations. At the same time, the templates enabled users to manage aspects of the design without eroding the overall brand. OHSU implemented extensive roles and permissions for users, allowing users to edit only those pages for which they were responsible. Approval workflows were also put in place to ensure integrity of content and greater consistency enterprise-wide.

The Solution: Take 2—A Strategic Approach & Enterprise-wide Roll Out

Aligning Technology to Strategy
Despite early successes, the power of the Web wasn't truly appreciated by OHSU executive management until 2006, at which time the Healthcare group had received funding for a website re-design. This time however, management wanted to pursue things more thoughtfully and with a clear vision of what the Web should be across all channels (Healthcare, Education, Research, and Outreach). OHSU assembled a panel consisting of staff and industry thought leaders to set the website vision, and then hired PaperThin partner—ISITE Design—to help develop a cohesive Web strategy.

"We wanted to carefully think through a strategy this time, rather than quickly implement a solution without having a clear vision of the end result. We wanted the right budget to put a new and good sized Web team in place. ISITE helped us focus in on our needs and develop a strategy for the website that would produce our desired results."
Renee McKechnie, Senior Web Engineer of OHSU

Historically, OHSU's websites had been anything but cohesive. The organization's approach to the Web was disjointed at best. OHSU lacked a standardized approach to CMS technology and content management processes; lacked a well-defined site architecture and user experience; and design standards varied across dozens of websites. Online, OHSU was one organization going in many directions—a great disadvantage for site visitors, which vary from healthcare consumers to medical school applicants to researchers to job seekers.

ISITE Design, which had an ongoing relationship with OHSU dating back to the earliest CommonSpot implementation, stepped in to help build a strategic blueprint for OHSU's Web presence. They began by engaging top-level decision makers and Web staff at OHSU, leading a series of structured strategic planning and discovery phases that included visiting with staff members, touring research labs, and interacting with patient services. Many strategic planning issues were considered, such as: How are new sites created at OHSU? How should a CMS be rolled out across the existing sites? Is CommonSpot the right CMS for OHSU? What's the best way to enable schools, departments, and labs with contentmanagement tools, while retaining centraloversight and brand control? And what's the best way to staff the Web at OHSU in order to provide the right level of service to internal clients?

Website visitors were put front and center in the planning process, with the goal of building an easy-to-navigate, interconnected Web environment that enabled visitors to navigate to the information they wanted to find—no matter their goals and reasons for visiting OHSU online. The result was a wide-ranging, top-to-bottom recommendation for overhauling how OHSU approaches the Web organization-wide—including a re-evaluation of their CMS software choice. That re-evaluation—which included looking at other CMS vendors—led to OHSU's conviction that CommonSpot was the right CMS platform to pull this all together.

Leveraging CommonSpot's Inherent Flexibility

With ISITE's strategy, information architecture recommendations, style guide, and new creative design in hand, OHSU began to implement the 'Unified Site Project' which is still being put into effect today. Of note, OHSU launched the redesign of its now unified main website (www.ohsu.edu). The website brings together disparate departments, divisions, services and labs into one cohesive whole that's visually stunning and technically powerful—all built using CommonSpot.

New Design—Locked and Loaded
Once created, OHSU locked in the new look and feel of the website using CommonSpot's robust template architecture, and then empowered individual schools and departments tolaunch and manage their own sections of the site. Users now manage aspects of the website design that fall within established OHSU brand and governance guidelines.

Users—Enabled
OHSU's centralized IT department retained control of the overall site infrastructure, while enabling content contributors to take control of the day to day management of the website. Using CommonSpot's extensive roles and permissions, schools and departments now control the assignment of ownership rights, enabling one or many users to manage a site, subsite, page, or even a section of a page. And those users assign roles and permissions to their respective teams—enabling them to create, tag, organize, manage, view and reuse content on the pages they own using CommonSpot's simple in-context editing tools. In short, OHSU's entire organization is more productive.

Content—Well Organized
Utilizing CommonSpot's rich metadata architecture, out-of-the-box taxonomy capabilities, and facet-based navigation, OHSU enabled business owners to organize content the way they want it for their area of responsibility, ultimately leading site visitors through a logical discovery path in order to find the exact information they are looking for.

Customer Ecosystem—Engaged
With so many audiences across all four business channels, CommonSpot needed to integrate with some unique tools to enable healthcare consumers, medical school applicants, researchers and job seekers to easily locate, contribute and interact with the section of the website that applied to them. Of note, OHSU integrated a best-of-breed search tool with CommonSpot, leveraging CommonSpot's rich metadata architecture and robust taxonomy capabilities to provide site visitors with the best search experience available.

The Benefits

While a work in progress, the OHSU website is among the best education and healthcare websites available today and has already won an eHealthcare Leadership award in 2008 for 'Best Site Design'. When speaking about benefits, perhaps in this instance, an OHSU team member said it best:

"CommonSpot is like Christmas for Web developers."
Laura Zeigen, MA, MLIS Systems & Web Development ManagerOHSU Library