About

Based in Liberty Lake, Washington, Spokane Teachers Credit Union (STCU) has grown to more than 230 employees serving tens of thousands of members from seven branches and has become Eastern Washington's largest, most successful credit union. With more than 75,000 members and $500 million in assets, membership eligibility has been expanded even further. STCU is a "full-service" financial institution - including investment accounts, comprehensive loan and credit services and free member conveniences.

Challenge

STCU is committed to maximizing members' benefits through cost-effective financial services consistent with cooperative principles, applicable legislation, and prudent management. The STCU 400-page and growing Web site is a key element in delivering this mission to its community. One of its biggest challenges was keeping the Web site’s content fresh and up-to-date with current information.
Prior to implementing Open Text Web Solutions, STCU was experiencing technical resource issues due to the dependency of departments throughout the organization to feed all request changes through the Information Systems (IS) department, thus creating a bottleneck. Very few staff members had the authority to make changes to the site and those who did were overloaded with other projects and unable to update the content in a timely manner. Furthermore, the absence of direct ownership and accountability of page content resulted in a stale Web site.

• The old Web site was too technical for non-technical staff to implement changes
• Departments within the organization were solely dependant on IS to make requests for changes, creating a bottleneck
• Slow feedback due to bottleneck constraints
• Content on site became stale and outdated

Solution

STCU responded to these challenges by implementing Open Text Web Solutions, a browser-based solution with a complex back-end, yet easy-to-use front end. It decentralizes Internet, intranet and Extranet content maintenance with a comprehensive toolset, delivering multiple publishing formats, content scheduling and rotation, version control, digital asset management, multi-lingual site management and a multi-level authorization and workflow structure.

“Open Text Web Solutions was selected for its competitive price point, licensing structure, and ease of set up,” said Danny Jones, a Web Developer for Spokane Teachers Credit Union. “A big selling point was the easy-to-use, browser-based interface for content authors. The ‘red dots’ are a simple concept for them to understand what they can edit on the Web site.”
Open Text Web Solutions met the needs of STCU and allowed it to efficiently maintain its high standards in several ways:

• Empowered content authors to manage their own content
• Freed up technical resources, enabling staff to concentrate on other business priorities
• New web projects are now easier to tackle
• Cross functional project teams collaborate seamlessly in the CMS environment

Results

As the STCU web presence continues to grow, the organization has already experienced a return on investment by implementing Open Text Web Solutions. “Prior to implementation, we spent a great deal of time updating the content on our Web site and could never get to the projects we really wanted to work on,” said Brian Lalonde, a Web Engineer for STCU. “Now, our technical resources are able to spend much more of their time on site architecture, application development, and implementing new technologies. Open Text Web Solutions has significantly increased our level of productivity.” In addition to liberating technical resources to concentrate on other business initiatives, STCU integrated Web Solutions and Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal Server to create the ultimate intranet portal.

• Website is now updated effortlessly every 30 minutes via Open Text Web Solutions’ publishing schedule or on-demand as determined by content authors
• Numerous employees now make content changes as needed without technical knowledge
• Content responsibility is distributed across the workplace, allowing STCU to not rely on any one person “dedicated” to updating the Web site

Facts and Figures

Customer: Spokane Teachers Credit Union

URL: http://www.stcu.org/

Project Duration: 4 months

Site Launch: November 15, 2001

Greatest Challenge: Implementing Dynamic Content

Site Scope: 200 (Web site) and 200 (intranet)

Integrated Components: SQL Server 2000, SharePoint 2001 Server, Home Banking System, and Custom Web Applications

For more information on Spokane Teachers Credit Union, log onto: www.stcu.org/