Kathryn Green, Chief Information Officer:

The new website came about because there’s been a commitment now to people that are, maybe first-time users or unrepresented people that come before the Commission. So we were looking to find ways that we could provide a more easy to use, easy to find information and able to access it from any equipment they might have—either at their home or any mobile devices.

The old site very much was focused towards our practitioners—people that already knew quite a lot about the Fair Work Commission and the way it worked. The old website was very much based around the legal language that we used very commonly in those days. Now we’re looking at more plain English so that people can feel that they understand the sort of things that we need to get across to them.

We decided that one way to be able give a quick entry point to a number of key player groups in the community was to provide these audience pages or these audience sites. So that simply means an employer or an employee can come to our site and see a quick way to get straight to the information that we believe they most commonly need.

For people with an industrial relations background the new site did have the information that they had been used to before but in different places. What we provided was some information sessions that we ran in Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane and we especially invited people from an industrial relations background to come in and get to know the new site and to give them an understanding of where the most familiar information is now stored on the site.

There were some challenges along the way—there always are. But we had a lot of consultation and collaboration between the branches and between Members and staff.

We definitely have further plans for improving the website. We’re looking at ways to further develop the audience channels. To make sure that we’re providing the right information at the right time to these groups. We’re also looking at ways to implement newer technology in regards to interactive forms—we plan to create more smart forms so that people can access and put their information straight into our system. That will be beneficial for our clients as well as us internally in improving our efficiency.

We look back on our statistics and see an employer might go to a particular site and then be utilising these sorts of information sheets or forms and then other things maybe not used as much—so we are looking at refining that over time.