We the People, Hold Adobe Experience Manager to be Self-Evidently the Best Content Management System

There’s an interesting development that ties together the city of Denver, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Marin County – beyond the obvious geographic closeness.

However, it is, in fact, the geography that strongly hints at the more interesting trend among state institutions and authorities. The cities of Sacramento and San Francisco, and the county of Marin are all, of course, home to California, a synonym of technological advancement.

So it’s no wonder that it’s there, reverberating from Silicon Valley, that government agencies and authorities are implementing the latest tech to its websites, innovating in the process, and pathing the way for other state agencies to replicate.

To be more specific, we see that these Californian agencies – as well as the city of Denver – decided to gather all of their digital content and host it on the leading CMS out there, Adobe Experience Manager. (Actually, I shouldn’t call AEM a CMS because it’s much more than that. I do apologise. AEM’s all-round ability to transform digital content and enhance visitor experiences means that it is a solid digital experience platform. You’re a DXP, AEM, Please forgive me.)

Adobe Experience Manager features a rich host of capabilities that simplifies and strengthens digital content and the accompanying experiences. These include:

1. AEM Forms, that helps create effective forms to capture and store information, deliver personalized communications, and protect sensitive information.
2. AEM Communities, offering the capabilities to build community centers such as forums, blogs, calendars etc. to deepen the connection between company and customer, and building brand loyalty.
3. AEM Assets, which simplifies teamwork processes and centralizes the managing of overflowing stacks of assets, such as videos and images.

Adobe Experience Manager can either be used as a stand alone platform for all your digital content, or can be optimized as part of a broader ecommerce strategy, such as with other member of the Adobe family like Analytics, Audience Member, Campaign and Target, or with other cloud families from the same neighborhood, like the ecommerce platform Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

But each government agency had their own reasons for implementing Adobe Experience Manager. So let’s take a look at each of them.

City of Denver

Founded in 1858, the city of Denver has a population of 700,000, making it the most populous city – and capital – in the state of Colorado. That’s a lot of people to be responsible for. But like almost all government-run agencies, their websites are not exactly bursting with innovative tech to simplify processes and make easy-as-possible digital experiences for all citizens.

Denver wanted to innovate, and encourage its citizens to do more business with the city online, but to make it faster and at less cost. And as the city’s central hub for government services, the City of Denver’s website is the go-to for citizen questions and queries.

The city recently switched its digital content platform to Adobe Experience Manager to boost its ability to create and deliver digital content to fit any screen. But also to streamline the creation process for websites pages and forms.

And the results of the city’s digital transformation have been very encouraging. AEM has resulted in 50% short times to create its annual Office of the Clerk and Recorder’s report; strengthens its employees in their ability to build visual content; suppress the time that is required to prototype web pages from 3 days to 4 hours; and overall simplifies the creation of content with libraries to quickly share assets and manage consistency across different departments.

City of Sacramento

Not the most popular or hip place in California but Sacramento is the capital of the state, and its half a million population needs a robust government website to go to. 

When the city came to Adobe Experience Manager, it was desperate to increase its number of subscribers to the city email list, and boost its open rate.

“I am really passionate about delivering technology solutions to make it easy for Sacramento residents to interact with city hall,” said Sadanandan, the city’s IT manager for enterprise. “I understand that this is a long and hard journey, but I am committed to provide the best customer experience to our citizens.

“There were multiple areas we were struggling with. We realized that a highly siloed model was not going to work for us very long. So we started looking at our cloud infrastructure, CRM, and customer engagement. And we wanted to find best-of-breed solutions in these three areas.”

Its results were also very encouraging. Email had been the primary way of interacting with its population – everything from parking restrictions to public health updates. Yet because of its legacy systems, it had a lot of weight keeping them from enhanced communication.

Within only a few months, their email list rose by 60,000 subscribers – representing around a 30% increase, and in addition, it recorded a 24% increase in its campaign open rate.

San Francisco Tax Office

The city of San Francisco and its County Tax Office recently took hold of Adobe Experience Manager and started to use it to optimize its self-service portal so that paying taxes becomes less painful than it already is for both individuals and businesses, while at the same time reducing the physical visits of citizens to the office.

“We’re responsible for collecting and managing approximately $9 billion for the city and county,” said Shah, the chief assistant treasurer of San Francisco. “The stakes are high and we need to do our job as accurately and efficiently as possible.

“The Forms capability within Adobe Experience Manager is an important component to help make that happen… With Adobe Experience Manager Forms, we offer taxpayers better visibility into what they owe and help them avoid unnecessary penalties.”

What’s great about AEM Forms is that when someone enters their info into the payment portal, in order to pay their taxes, it feeds the data into the back-end system, which identifies the person and links them with tax info that is relevant to their situation.

From there, AEM creates the payment data and places it into a personalized PDF statement, which is then mailed to the taxpayer. 

Among its results from its AEM switch, the San Fran Tax Office saw a 10% boost to the number of taxpayers who use the portal, faster billing summaries, and a suppressed time in the creation of tax bills by 50%. 

Marin County

“We saw a demo for Adobe Experience Manager Forms, and we were immediately intrigued by its strong mobile support across devices,” said Linda Jamieson, Applications Integration Manager, Marin County. “But what really sold us on Adobe Experience Manager Forms is the ability to tie forms into the work processes. 

“The back-end support allows us to make forms that are easier for the public to access while streamlining workflows so that we can respond much faster.”

Marin County had the objectives of providing a mobile-friendly service, improved access to forms, and to increase public engagement with simpler form submissions. 

And by integrating AEM with its existing SQL Server databases, the county is now able to build clever and automated forms.

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Adobe Experience Manager development & strategy teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.