Dataweavers - State Transport Department

From Stretched Thin to Strategic Focus

This Department is one of the most citizen-facing departments in this state's Government. From renewing licences and booking driving tests to planning travel and accessing public transport updates, their digital services support millions of citizens every year.

But internally, the team was stuck in survival mode. Sitecore upgrades were taking over a year to complete. Deployments required scheduled business-hour downtime. Change requests sat in backlog for years. Worse, up to 75% of the team’s time was going into patching, load balancing, and troubleshooting platform issues, not delivering services.

The department knew the mission was bigger than just keeping the website online. They needed to transform how digital delivery worked, from the infrastructure up.

A Platform That Was Slowing the Team Down

The complexity of their Sitecore environment was dragging down velocity and creating operational risk:

• Infrastructure was not highly available, causing frequent site interruptions.
• Support was internal and reactive, requiring 1.5–2.5 FTEs weekly to manage Azure.
• Due to predicted downtime, releases occurred outside of business hours, creating deployment friction.
• A backlog of up to 4 years had accumulated due to limited capacity and lack of automation.
• All changes required board approval, introducing heavy governance delays.
• Only 7 releases were achieved in 2024, despite growing demand from stakeholders.

The platform was focused more on maintenance than delivering value to the state, with a delivery model that couldn’t meet business demand, and a digital team caught in the weeds of platform infrastructure.