Platform · GovCMS
The front door to government.
Most people never walk into a government office. They walk through its website. For more than 100 agencies, that website runs on GovCMS. People judge it against the best experiences they've had anywhere, not against government standards. We deliver both.
GovCMS is the Australian Government's whole-of-government content management and web hosting platform. It is managed by the Department of Finance, built on the open-source Drupal platform, and runs more than 300 government websites for more than 100 agencies.
Each of those sites is a front door. It is where citizens check what they are entitled to, where businesses find out which rules apply to them, and where staff look up the policy they need. When people struggle with government, they usually struggle there first.
Why it matters
A front door has to work for everyone.
Trust
People judge a service by its website. A site that is current, secure and recognisably government tells people they are in the right place, and that what they read can be relied on.
Inclusion
Everyone has to be able to get through: people with disability, older Australians, people in regional areas and people with low digital confidence. WCAG 2.2 AA is the floor, not the finish line.
Cost
Every question a website can't answer becomes a phone call, an email or a complaint. At Defence's ICT Service Centre, redesigning the digital front door cut service-desk calls by 40% and lifted digital self-service by more than 200%.
Standards
The Digital Experience Policy sets four standards for government services: Digital Service, Digital Inclusion, Digital Access and Digital Performance. A shared, centrally patched platform makes them achievable for agencies of every size.
Most people never walk into a government office. They walk through its website.
Our GovCMS services
Everything a GovCMS site needs, from one team.
Senior and lead people across strategy, design, build and support, working to the Digital Service Standard, WCAG 2.2 AA and the Australian Government Style Manual.
Strategy and architecture
Discovery, service intent, user journeys, content and information architecture, platform roadmaps and business cases.
- Strategist
- Business analyst
- Solution and technical architect
- Service designer
- Change manager
- Information architect
- Digital experience strategist
User experience and design
Research with real users, design against the Australian Government Design System, and production-ready accessible patterns for GovCMS themes.
- UX/UI designer
- User researcher
- Content strategist and designer
- Accessibility specialist
- Interaction designer
- Digital art designer
- Drupal content publisher
Development, integration and migration
Site building on the GovCMS Drupal distribution, theming, integration with agency systems, content migration, and functional, automated and accessibility testing.
- Drupal developer
- Drupal theme builder
- Integration specialist
- Quality assurance and test engineer
- Delivery manager
Support, operations and enhancement
Keeping sites secure, fast and improving after launch, with a named technical account manager.
- DevOps support engineer
- Technical account manager
Fixed-scope packages
Know what you'll get before you start.
Common GovCMS work, packaged with a defined scope, inclusions and outcome.
Website assessments
- Site assessment workshops
- 1, 3 or 5 days, combining analytics, content and technical review with stakeholder and user sessions, ending in a prioritised, costed roadmap.
- Accessibility audit
- WCAG 2.2 AA audit of up to 30 representative pages and templates, with automated scanning and manual expert review.
- Digital Experience Policy readiness
- Two days reviewing a site or service against the policy's four standards.
- Migration assessment
- Five days for Drupal 7, older Drupal, other CMS or static sites moving to GovCMS, with an automated content inventory from Systemik's PerformX.
- Performance measurement set-up
- Five days establishing the baseline, KPIs and reporting the Digital Performance Standard asks for.
- Search and content readiness
- Five days preparing priority pages so site search and chatbots find and answer them correctly.
- Public web mapping
- Three days reviewing public maps and location services, for accessibility and plain-language meaning.
Discovery
- Standard discovery
- Four weeks for a single site or service: user research, measurable objectives aligned to the Digital Service Standard, and a technical solution design.
- Extended discovery
- Eight weeks for multi-audience sites, adding prototyping and validation with users.
Build and delivery
- Content-rich site on GovCMS SaaS
- Built to approved designs on the GovCMS distribution: content types, taxonomies, workflow, theming and migration.
- Feature-rich site on GovCMS PaaS
- Custom Drupal development, including custom modules and integrations, with code and documentation delivered to Finance.
Support
- Monthly support blocks
- 10, 20, 50 or 100 hours a month for GovCMS SaaS, PaaS and other Drupal sites.
- Support retainers
- Standard support, or support plus ongoing optimisation of content and performance.
- Accessibility remediation sprint
- Ten days of developer and content-designer effort fixing critical and high WCAG 2.2 AA defects.
- After-hours call-out
- Technical cover outside business hours when something can't wait.
Training and skills
- Courses for up to 10 people
- GovCMS content editor (1 day), GovCMS site builder (2 days), and accessible content and the Style Manual (1 day).
- Documentation and e-learning
- Role-based guides for editors, publishers and administrators, quick reference guides and short e-learning modules.
- Skills transfer
- A 10-day block of workshops, mentoring and train-the-trainer, used flexibly over up to six months.
Every support package includes severity-based response and resolution targets, critical security patches applied within 48 hours (24/7), named escalation and monthly value reporting.
How we deliver
Discovery, Alpha, Beta, Live.
Each phase is scoped and valued on its own, so an agency can stop, pivot or re-compete at any gate.
Discovery
User research, analytics and content audits, ending in a validated problem, user needs and a costed Alpha proposal.
Alpha
Ideas tested with low- and high-fidelity prototypes and real users, ending in a recommended Beta scope.
Beta
A minimum viable service built on GovCMS in two-week sprints, with continuous accessibility, security and performance testing.
Live
Public release, monitoring and an enhancement backlog prioritised on evidence, with knowledge transfer to the agency.
Built in at every phase
- WCAG 2.2 AA in the definition of done for every design and build increment
- Testing with screen readers, keyboard-only navigation and magnification
- Paid testers with lived experience of disability in every Beta
- Plain language written to the Australian Government Style Manual
- Research across the audiences a service must reach, including First Nations, culturally diverse and regional communities
- Page-weight budgets and a performance baseline from Discovery onwards
Towards Gov 4.0
From pages to services that come to you.
Government 4.0 is government that is connected, personalised and proactive: services that know the rules, use the data an agency already holds, and meet people at the moment they need help. AI is how agencies get there faster, provided people stay accountable for every decision.
- Gov 1.0
Information
Agencies publish what they do.
- Gov 2.0
Transactions
Forms and payments move online.
- Gov 3.0
Digital services
Services designed around users, to the Digital Service Standard.
- Gov 4.0
Proactive services
Connected, personalised and AI-assisted, grounded in rules and data, with people accountable.
What AI adds to a GovCMS site
Find information
Search and answers drawn from the agency's own pages, citing the page they came from.
Check eligibility
Rules as Code calculators that give the same answer for the same facts, traceable to the legislation.
Understand my situation
Guided journeys by life event or business need, with a hand-off to a person when needed.
Apply or submit
Form help that explains fields and checks completeness. No decision is made without explicit authorisation.
Get to the right place
Routing to the right service or channel, and to a human when the system is unsure.
Tell us how it went
Content gaps and failed searches turned into evidence for content teams.
Four tests we hold it to
Sovereign
Runs in the agency's own cloud account, in an Australian region.
Accountable
An AI register, decision rights and accountable officers, aligned to whole-of-government responsible AI policy.
Explainable
Answers cite their source; rules are traceable to the legislation.
Bounded
AI never makes or carries out a decision the agency hasn't explicitly authorised.
Our AI business, Availe, designs, builds and runs these capabilities inside agency tenancies on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or GovAI, then transfers them to agency teams. Visit availe.ai (opens in a new tab)
Mapping
Maps that tell people what a place means for them.
Hazards, services, boundaries and eligibility are often about where someone lives. We design public maps and location services that people can actually use.
Interactive public maps
Location services and interactive maps on GovCMS sites, built on Google Maps Platform and Esri, and Systemik's TLCMap for places and time.
Accessible by design
Every map has an equivalent list or table view, keyboard and screen-reader operable controls, and a plain-language summary of what a location or hazard means.
What does this mean for my address?
Where an agency approves it, a conversational answer grounded in the agency's authoritative data and Google Maps data via Vertex AI.
Story maps and data
Narrative maps such as ArcGIS StoryMaps for explaining programs, hazards and change over time to the public.
Start with a three-day public web mapping assessment, led by a strategist with national hazard-mapping experience as a former emergency management chief data officer.
Our Drupal partner
Serata and Systemik: 20 years of building together.
Systemik Solutions is an Australian-owned open-source engineering firm based in Glebe, Sydney. Founded in 1995, it has delivered more than 480 projects across government, finance and academia, designing, building and supporting platforms on Drupal, WordPress, Heurist and Omeka S.
The two firms have worked side by side for more than 20 years. Serata leads strategy, research, design, content, accessibility, delivery management and quality. Systemik supplies Drupal architecture, development, theming, DevOps, content migration and after-hours technical cover. Agencies deal with one accountable team.
Systemik's tools
PerformX
A content migration workbench. It crawls a legacy site to inventory pages, assets, content types and duplicates, then automates content analysis, mapping, transformation and quality assurance into Drupal and GovCMS.
Power Drupal CMS
Systemik's own Drupal distribution, built for rich, immersive publication sites.
Glycerine, READ and TLCMap
Workbenches for research collections, annotation and mapping cultural data in place and time.
Open-source stack
Drupal distribution and custom module development, PHP, Twig and Composer, Heurist, Omeka S and WordPress, IIIF, and cloud hosting and DevOps.
Is your front door working?
Start with a one-day site assessment, and leave with a prioritised, costed roadmap.