NTG Central

Captovate's biggest intranet project to date, and one of our most ambitious, is the whole of Northern Territory Government's internal services portal, known as NTG Central.  

Driven by the Department of Corporate and Information Services, but bringing together content from all of NTG's shared service agencies including Corporate Services, Treasury, Business, Chief Minister and more, our brief was to plan, design and deliver a tool that is engaging and super user friendly.  We were also given the go-ahead to develop the new intranet using the world leading open source Content Management System, Drupal.

This gave the Captovate team a major boost in our ability to deliver more flexiblity, functionality and 'outside the square' experiences for users, very exciting for one of the Government's flagship portals! 

As expected, the magnitude of content and users for an intranet of this scope was enormous, so a lot of very careful user consultation, testing, planning and information architecture was completed before any code was written, in order to map out an innovative and effective tool that allows tens of thousands of Government employees to find the right tools and information to manage their jobs and keep on top of day-to-day work.  The approach we proposed from all this planning was a distinctly app-like tool, that was first and foremost about the functions and pathways for quickly and easily drilling down through multiple layers of information without getting lost or frustrated.  We designed a home page that achieved this through a seriously interactive mega menu navigation structure that allowed multi-layer exploration, coupled with powerful search and quick access to key categories like contacts and online tools. 

 The most used and important features are right at users' fingertips, through the intranet's direct integration with the NTG's whole staff directory, and central access to all of the Government's major online systems for all departments.  Thanks to some fancy codework, users can even save their favourite online systems to be quickly accessed every time they return to the site.  All these quick access tools sit alongside 749 pages of content and a whopping 1103 (and counting) documents, all arranged into tidy logical categories that make this minefield of information feel simple and even pleasant to navigate through.  

NTG Central celebrated a soft launch to selected agencies late in November 2014, and already the response from users has been fantastic, with over 86,000 views and great uptake of the handy new tools on offer.  We are super proud to have been a part of the team that brought NTG Central to life and ushered in a new era of modern, progressive web technologies within the NT Government.