Citizen-friendly digital solutions
Openness, innovation, and participation are the new benchmarks for digital government. Yellow Pencil partners with governments and public sector organizations to create citizen-friendly digital solutions.
Our solutions include:
Web design and development
Experiences that put users first
Most of our client relationships start with a redesign of your core web property. Our process starts with user research, content audits, and workshops to understand your organization’s goals. We put content at the heart of our work, testing navigation, wayfinding and searchability throughout. Our interdisciplinary teams will work collaboratively with you to plan and deliver a fully modernized experience both for your end users as well as your content creators and managers. We’ll also help you with training, governance and lifecycle management strategies.
We’ve built our practice around the Drupal open source content management system which enables us to create highly structured content systems as well as to integrate to back office and other core systems. Some organizations don’t want to own the ongoing complexity of open source software, so we have fully integrated Drupal into Google Cloud Platform. We provide a fully managed service as part of our OnPoint WebOps platform, so we’ll be accountable for all system updates and administration. We’ve also integrated Drupal with the Box Content Cloud to enable seamless, secure access to web content as well as to any documents or digital assets created in back office productivity software.
Once we launch your new front end website, we’ll put you on our responsive support program. Our dedicated support team will address issues and requests that come up throughout the life of your website to ensure that the value of your investment is sustained.
Case study: Alberta Gaming, Liquor and CannabisAutomated communications
Multichannel service agents, powered by machine learning
Many organizations augment their web content with conversational agents that can help connect web visitors to the information they need when navigation and search aren’t enough. We work with Google’s Dialogflow tools to create helpful agents that can communicate with your end users in natural language. Google’s powerful text to speech technology allows us to surface these agents through your website, through text messaging, or even through your call centre and social media channels.
A well trained automated agent can answer questions based on your web content, but also be trained on structured data sources like transit information, open data, recreation schedules, geographic data and more. Google’s platform also allows us to integrate with back office systems, so the agent can create tickets to report a service issue, log a customer call in your CRM, or schedule or modify an appointment. We’d love to show you what else we can automate.
We know that service organizations thrive because of your great people, but those people have capacities and bed times. An automated agent lowers service costs, reduces wait times and expands the channels and hours that your users can use to communicate with you.
Contact us to learn more about how automated agents can expand your communications offering while significantly reducing your cost to serve.
Case study: City of EdmontonDigital strategy
Planning, change management, maturity roadmapping
Today, the demands of digital mean that public sector organizations are becoming more like software companies than software customers. Building the capabilities, processes, and people to deliver software at scale takes time. We’ve worked with large and small organizations for decades to plan their roadmaps to digital maturity. We’ve developed our own roadmapping model based on what the leaders in digital government have done.
We can help assess your current state and tailor a roadmap for the unique needs of your organization. Creating great end user experiences doesn’t come from installing the right software, it comes from research, design, testing, development, quality assurance, and ongoing performance measurement. We can help you to plan out your internal team, governance, and operational procedures, or we can augment your existing staff with a collaborative team of experts from our staff.
We’re here to partner with you and to develop a sustainable plan to move you forward on your journey.
Case study: The Wharton School at the University of PennsylvaniaService design
Enterprise wide service optimization and innovation
Service design applies a holistic, systems perspective to better understand the landscape in which your organization and users operate. This means evaluating your effectiveness at delivering the services that your prospects and stakeholders expect.
Service design aims to align people, processes, and things (like technology and content) across time, space and intent. This often means examining the transitions between physical, offline, and digital transactions. As a practice, it allows Yellow Pencil to suggest foundational improvements to the way you provide value to your users, and the employees delivering it.
Case study: Alberta Union of Provincial EmployeesCloud hosting and managed services
Cost saving WebOps tools for deployment and performance
OnPoint WebOps is our all-in-one hosting and deployment solution that guarantees top performance while drastically reducing demands on your staff. It is optimized for Drupal and built across multiple Google Cloud Platform (GCP) zones, able to withstand an unlikely total zone failure without missing a beat — all while delivering 99.95% uptime.
Your staff can preview and test new code in safe environments and deploy with confidence and ease, while we take care of all upgrades, maintenance and monitoring. We’re also able to locate your data exclusively in specific Google Regions to comply with data sovereignty goals, and of course because we run on the Google Cloud Platform all data is encrypted to the highest levels at rest, in memory and in transit - and GCP services are carbon neutral so you can sleep well at night.
Discover OnPoint WebOps