Case Study - Bureau of Land Management (BLM)

Lift, shift and innovate

How stepping up from one CMS to another led to a giant leap in innovative thinking.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is an organization with its ear to the ground and an eye on the future, both literally and figuratively. With roots that go back as far as independence, BLM was formerly established in 1946 to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations. BLM manages one in every 10 acres of land in the United States, and approximately 30 percent of the Nation’s minerals. These encompass forests, mountains, rangelands, arctic tundra, and deserts. To effectively cultivate community-based conservation, citizen-centered stewardship, and partnership through consultation, cooperation, and communication, BLM relies on a robust digital presence, accessible to the many thousands of Americans who make use of the site. To ensure that the website, and its content management system (CMS) in particular, remains on the frontier of innovation, BLM turned to Tactis for both maintenance and a replatform from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, an operation also known as a ‘lift and shift.’

Thinking beyond the upgrade

Tactis put together a dedicated team of front end and back end developers to take on the epic undertaking of facilitating the migration of data from the one site to the next. From a migration standpoint, the goal was not to have to manually migrate tens of thousands of pages of content, and the primary concern was to ensure that actions that take place in Drupal 8 on the newly platformed site occur the same way they did on Drupal 7. To achieve this, the development team attempted to use as many core modules as possible as part of that. One early identifiable pain point, and the biggest challenge for Tactis, was just the way the organization had structured their data and some of the techniques that they were using as workarounds in D7, which were not optimal.

The horizon is the limit

After the successful lift and shift, Tactis worked to help the Bureau of Land Management understand the possibilities of its digital presence in terms of innovation. The agency demoed Mautic, dubbed the world's largest open-source marketing automation project, and introduced Chatbot, a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech. In addition, Tactis worked actively with BLM to understand their hosting environments and needs, plus potentials for the web presence, including brokering conversations with vendors and steering them through those processes. Other technologies on the horizon are personalization and self-service. Ultimately, building innovation and planning for the future, and being not just a technical partner but a strategic partner in how brands think about their problems, is the modus operandi of Tactis – going beyond the lift and shift.