Enabling self-management of a web traffic analytics system

Summary

The challenge

The State of Connecticut wanted to make date-driven decisions when developing new digital resources, but accessing analytics was a cumbersome process and employees weren’t confident in the data. In the past, they’d worked with external teams that developed solutions and then handed them off for maintenance. The team was maintaining the solutions using some software development processes, but wasn’t sure if they were following best practices.

The solution

Members of the Skylight team were originally instrumental in developing analytics.usa.gov, and we knew we could reuse the open-source code to develop a similar tool for the State of Connecticut. The original open-source analytics tool wasn’t developed for a Windows environment, so we used this development project as a way to coach the State of Connecticut team on software development best practices.

Knowing that previous consultants had developed solutions that were difficult to maintain, we decided it was critical to success for the State of Connecticut team to feel confident maintaining the solution. To do that, we worked in tandem with their data stakeholder to conduct user research, design the solution, and even commit some code. By customizing open-source code and coaching the team throughout the process, we were able to make the best use of taxpayer dollars and enable the State of Connecticut’s team to maintain the solution.

Now, agencies have insight into which websites and pages are used and how they’re used, which informs future projects. Moreover, citizens of Connecticut can view the information and use the open-source project to build other data visualizations.

The results

• Delivered an analytics dashboard using customized open-source code
• Involved and enabled the department’s team to develop and maintain the solutions using software development best practices
• Increased data transparency for the State of Connecticut’s agencies and citizens