Agile Digital

About the Department of Immigration and Border Protection

The Department of Home Affairs was subsumed by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBA). At the time of the project, DIBA was responsible for visitor visas, border immigration control, Australian citizenship, ethnic affairs and customs and border control.

Background

In 2013 DIBA was investing in digital channel technology to reduce the reliance on costly direct engagement channels such as in person, phone or email. With over 1.8 million applications being lodged by tourist visas alone in 2012-2013, increasing  6.4% from previous year, the costs associated with the direct engagement channels would continue to grow.

The eVisitor mobile app, conceived by DIBA, provided a self-service smartphone app to clients with queries regarding Visas for Australian entrance.

The eVisitor App needed to access and serve up-to-date visa related information that had previously only been available within the Department’s Oracle RightNow platform. The eVisitor App project also established a platform for delivering future digital channels quickly.

Agile Digital, experienced in application development integration with on premise departmental systems, was chosen to deliver the eVisitor mobile app.

Mission

Agile Digital was engaged to:

• Design a smartphone app experience offering workflow-based guidance to international clients in a accessible, discoverable and clear format.
• Publish a secure cloud API platform to service additional client mobile channels as they come online.
• Implement a cloud integration layer to securely access (and make searchable) continually updated knowledge assets maintained within the corporate knowledge-base system.
• Provide an administration capability with maintainability & security features that minimise the operational burden on the department.

Approach

Applying our Agile Digital methodologies we undertook:

• Discovery to understand desirable experience behaviour such as country location based FAQ’s, access and security considerations integration considerations with on premise knowledge databases.
• The analysis and design outcome provided a user interface developed as a smartphone app supporting both iPhone and Android smartphone devices. Fuzzy search and data service APIs on a RedHat Linux platform hosted within Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure. Integration with the departmental Oracle RightNow system, achieved using XML data exchange technology.
• Implementation was undertaken quickly with agile methodology. The smartphone apps and secure cloud platform were handed over with training and documentation for the ongoing administration of the channel by the department.

Outcome

Agile Digital designed and developed this enterprise-grade mobile channel in under two months from project initiation, successfully demonstrating the Department’s first mobile-delivered, API-powered and cloud-based client service channel.