The Landscape

The National Institute of Corrections (NIC) is dedicated to providing training and technical assistance to local and federal corrections organizations. As part of that mission, their Information Center provides much of the front-line interaction between corrections professionals and the Agency. Our team maintains NIC’s digital enterprise, their helpdesk, and engages with students who visit NIC’s Training Academy in Aurora Colorado.

In my time at NIC, I’ve established myself as a technical expert, filling gaps in skillsets and advising both team and agency personnel on decisions that have to do with everything from setting up podcasts to filming and delivering videos. This has led me to taking on a wide variety of tasks that I never expected to learn and excel at.

Environment

When I started at NIC, the website was an old and buggy ASP.net application running on a temperamental Windows server. More often than not, the rule was not to touch anything so as not to break it. My first task was to build a new version of the NIC website from scratch using Drupal 7. I completed that project in 2017 and we launched the website to much excitement by the Agency and its constituents. We implemented a number of new features including better search, more interactive data, better organization of the data, and user roles and permissions.

Stakeholder Meetings

Throughout my time with NIC, it has been important to have stakeholder buy-in from all 3 levels of the client agency (line staff, division chiefs, and directors). Depending on the project, I have conducted multiple sessions to present wireframes, final designs, and follow-up user training on what I’ve created. These have culminated in trust being developed between the clients, myself, and the rest of my team as we’ve made NIC more dynamic and interactive with their constituents over time.

Micro websites

After the 2017 re-launch of NICIC.gov, I turned my attentions to our microsites. Microsites are small websites dedicated to one topic or course that NIC teaches. There are about 35 of them and they were each a little unique and required attention and care. In addition to creating and maintaining the microsites, we also continued to expand the features of the main website by rebuilding and relaunching NIC’s forums and community website to allow for corrections professionals to have a place to collaborate, have private group discussions, and connect with the public if needed. This community website was built in Drupal 8 as the Drupal association had communicated that version 7 was supposed to be end-of-life in 2021.

Community Engagement

Learning Drupal 8, Composer, and Drush was a task in and of itself. It required a complete reorientation to the way a developer approaches web development in that environment – making it almost completely command line based rather than Drupal 7’s UI-based approach.

Documentation

During this time, NIC was also working on moving into the Cloud. The governmental process for this is to first meet the requirements for an “Authority to Test” (ATT) process, followed by a similar “Authority to Operate” (ATO) process. I became the point person for this effort – doing research, creating documentation, and meeting with stakeholders and ATT/ATO evaluators to make sure that our current system, as well as the system we wanted developed in the Cloud, met or exceeded the standards of the Bureau of Prisons, NIC’s parent Agency. NIC continues to use and update the documentation and tabletop exercises I developed as part of their annual system review each year.

Outside of the ATT/ATO plans, exercises, and other documentation, I’ve created tutorials and guides for my team on almost every process I’ve created for our daily tasks. I firmly believe that hoarding knowledge means that you weaken your team’s ability to function without you and I don’t ever want my team to be non-functional if I have a sick day. This has led to me creating over 50 step-by-step walkthroughs in both video and text formats so that anyone else can learn to do what I had to figure out from scratch.

Drupal 9

In 2021, it was time to rebuild NIC’s website again in Drupal 9. While there is a migration path between Drupal 7 and 9, it was not at all easy. I spent months trying to get my head around the requirements some of our modules needed in order to get their data from one version to the other.

The two systems were effectively non-communicative and documentation for many modules that manage critical website functions was almost non-existent, even today. I ended up MacGuyvering a solution that was part automated migration and part manual transfer of data. The goal was to make as few changes as possible for users while updating the underlying infrastructure and the design of the website to use the USWDS theme that’s now required for all US governmental websites.

Other systems

As part of our Drupal 9 upgrades, NIC wanted to implement Single Sign-On as part of their infrastructure. After some research, my fellow web developer, Billy, and I figured out that Drupal has existing solutions for SimpleSAMLphp integration. At the time of this writing, we connected all of NIC’s Drupal 9 websites together as well as a connection to Overdrive, NIC’s e-book library service.

We also attempted to link to Oracle’s Learn.com Learning Management System (LMS), but found that the connection leaked user data as much as Uncle Buck telling family secrets at the reunion once he’s had a few. NIC is currently in the process of transferring to another LMS system and we are hopeful of being able to link the two systems once that move has been completed.

Aside from SAML, I’ve also done my best to improve our site security by enhancing the user sign-on process, activating anti-spam measures, and ensuring the site was disallowing any non-permitted scripts to run through Content Security Policies.

Branding and Marketing

I have to start with a disclaimer, I am not the best designer in the world. I have close friends who are designers and I easily see how far I am from being able to create masterpieces. With that said, I know a lot of the rules of graphic design and felt the “nails on the chalk board” feeling every time I looked at NIC’s existing marketing materials and communications from before I got there. I’ve advocated for NIC to hire a graphic designer ever since I was hired.

The other major undertaking I pushed for at NIC was to update their branding. The agency had an old, thin style guide from an agency that, in my opinion, didn’t know how color theory worked. The agency’s own logo clashed with itself and there were very few indicators that any two NIC documents would be recognizable if compared side by side because something as fundamental as font choice varied so much.

To resolve these issues, I created a basic style guide in 2017, updated the color palette, and streamlined marketing materials to match the website and new guidelines. In 2022, I expanded the style guide to match the USWDS styles and gave it a lot more detail for other contractors who work with NIC to get information about how to create NIC products.

The products of the style guide have been the marketing materials we created for conferences. This has included flyers, trifold brochures, and sticky notes with product information on them and QR codes for easy access. I also created digital experiences for NIC’s interactive booth computers so that conference attendees could easily find NIC’s most in-demand services and publications.

In addition, I’ve created 5 email templates through GovDelivery that have elevated the Agency’s email marketing efforts. What had previously looked like they’d been designed in Windows 95, now look like modern emails that utilize bold imagery, headers, a unified color palette, and white space.