International Trade Administration: Web Services

Getting to the Point

Download our ITA Web Services Case Study

Challenge

Trade.Gov is the website for the International Trade Administration (ITA), Department of Commerce. ITA supports President Obama’s recovery agenda and the National Export Initiative to sustain economic growth and support American jobs. The website project goals outlined by ITA included: the consolidation of the ITA web content for presentation as a single corporate entity; to enhance the web site visitor’s experience by making information easy to find; to provide additional avenues for specific content to “float to the top”; to help ITA’s web communications expand beyond ITA office stovepipes; and to address trade audiences not served by the Export.gov website. It was indicated that the website’s content should be sorted and available by the mission areas of ITA: Helping U.S. Businesses, Promoting Trade and Investment, Strengthening U.S. Industry Competitiveness, and Ensuring Fair Trade. This content also needed to be sorted and available by industry and country. Its presentation is based on the framework of the Export.Gov & WhiteHouse.Gov websites, with minor changes for ITA standardization.

Solution

The MIL Corporation (MIL) led the new information architecture and redesign of the Trade.Gov website. On this project, MIL worked to migrate the ASP based Trade.Gov into an Oracle (Stellent) Universal Content Management System. This solution provided easy contribution of content by most Office of Public Affairs personnel. MIL was responsible for system architecture, configuration, administration, development, and implementation. In addition, MIL developed various custom workflows, themes, and components for the website.

Benefit

The act of migrating the ASP based Trade.Gov into the Oracle Universal Content Management System increased OCIO’s IT staff and user productivity. Further, this solution provided significant cost savings from increased IT staff efficiency and lower capital and operating expenses (as learned from Export.Gov and Trade Compliance Center websites).