American Cancer Society Case Study - Ironworks Consulting

American Cancer Society

American Cancer Society is a nationwide community-based health organization.

Client:	American Cancer Society
Technology:	Microsoft Windows IIS Web Platform MS SQL Database Eprise Participant Server HTML, ASP, .NET, VB/J++ COM/COM+
Industry:	Non-Profit
Service:	Application Maintenance

The Challenge

The American Cancer Society (“ACS”) hired a large Web systems integrator to design and develop a new version of their public Web site (www.cancer.org). The main purpose for the Web site is to provide a destination for the sharing of information between cancer constituents and the dissemination of cancer-related content. In addition, the site handles donations and employer matching gifts. A content management system, Eprise, was implemented to support the creation and publishing of over 14,000 pages of content.

ACS had a limited staff available to support the redesigned Web site. The focus of the staff members was on the management of content and definition of new functionality. ACS chose to find a partner to handle the on-call support, application management, and enhancement work for the new site in order to allow for staff members’ time to be used more strategically.

The Solution

Ironworks was initially engaged before the system integrator completed their warranty period to allow for knowledge transfer of the site architecture and technologies. Ironworks’ deep skills in content management systems and Microsoft technologies helped to shorten this process. After the initial transition phase, Ironworks provided continued web application support as additional web applications (www.acsactiveforlife.org, www.fightcancer.org, www.csn.org) were added. Ironworks provides the following support services to ACS:

24 x 7 on-call problem support
Source code control and maintenance
Automated change request/issue tracking
Support of development, test/QA and staging environments
Release management
Application maintenance and functional enhancements
Content Management System maintenance and enhancements
Application Integration

The Results

Ironworks provides a turn-key code and content maintenance operation for ACS. This allows the ACS Web team to focus on creating and publishing new content to the site, defining new functional requirements, and crafting the strategic vision for the Web channel without diverting focus to application issues. Ironworks implemented a proven release management process to provide predictability and reliability to site changes. In addition, ACS realized the following benefits:

Automated change/issue tracking process
Rigorous quality assurance and integration testing
Improved application stability

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