Welcome to the 100th agency to join GovCMS

Recently we celebrated the 100th government agency to join GovCMS. Welcome Questacon to our community.

We now host 341 websites with 46 websites still in development.

We’ve come a long way since launching GovCMS in 2015. Thank you to the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (now Sport Integrity Australia) for being the first to join us on our journey.

GovCMS started from small beginnings with a simple idea to improve government digital service delivery.

‘Our goal was to create a common platform and set of tools to share across government. I think we’ve achieved this and so much more,’ said GovCMS founder, Sharyn Clarkson.

‘Through GovCMS we have created a transferable set of skills across government. This alone is an achievement. It breaks down barriers to collaboration. It empowers government agencies to form surge teams. This opens up endless possibilities from delivering a complex project together to assisting smaller agencies with limited resources. Working collaboratively ultimately helps improve Australians experience with the online government environment. Compare this to five years ago when government websites required specialist knowledge.

‘Agencies don’t just join GovCMS, they join a community. It’s what makes us different from any other service on the market. We grow in strength as the community grows. Together we innovate, problem solve and share.

‘We’ve been grateful for every agency that has joined us and helped to achieve and celebrate many milestones over the years.’

In July 2016, we won the IPAA Award for ‘Contributing to a Culture or Practice of Innovation’. The GovCMS Community was established, digital teams were becoming more connected. It wasn’t long before agencies started to build innovative features for the platform, and teams from State and Commonwealth agencies began co-developing features such as the data visualisation tool.

In 2018, we partnered with Salsa Digital and amazee.io switching to a new technology stack. This provided automatic scaling which enables us to manage significant traffic on the platform. It was an important milestone. Unknown to us at the time we would see a traffic peak to two billion hits on the platform in March 2020 in response to COVID-19 and the platform remained stable.

We would like to take the opportunity to thank all our members for joining us. We look forward to reaching many more milestones together.’