Development of user-oriented digital services for 71,000 students

About the project

SiO operates in several "sectors", such as student housing, training centers, catering, physical and mental health, kindergartens, and careers advice. This multi-faceted and complex operation requires a combination of scalable and shared components of the IT architecture as well as a user-oriented, flexible approach to product and service design and development.

The challenge

SiO is on a continuous journey related to transforming IT architecture, integrations and digital services. In addition, they wanted to streamline their work with portfolio management and new, flexible methodologies and processes. SiO also wanted to renew all its services from being sector-oriented to becoming user-oriented. Much of the information SiO is processing has previously been unprioritized, and therefore appeared unclear to the users.

Our approach

Tailor-made cooperation

In order to organize work and projects efficiently, we have contributed to establishing a separate SiO project methodology. We have designated leads in the teams that work directly with SiO's product owners, and we have created small, interdisciplinary teams that cover the entire scope of the project: from strategy, through content, design conventions and user testing up to architecture, development and process management. We work together with SiO's employees in a DevOps regime and with an agile approach. To ensure the highest levels of coordination and change management, we involved the business side of SiO whilst the projects were ongoing.

End-to-end technology solutions

As a technical partner for SiO, we are responsible for the entire range of services, from management and further development of core systems to the design and development of websites, digital services, the My SiO app and internal specialist applications. Bearing in mind design and brand image was very important to SiO, we put particular emphasis on branding and graphical part of the scope of work.

In order to achieve stability at the back end and agility at the front end, we are building a digital service platform that retrieves "data from the depths" and that serves content for all student-related services. New sio.no platform is built with Next.js and React, with Enonic XP Headless as CMS and with an existing service layer for integration with various core systems.

The development of the housing service for the students is based on .NET, ASP.NET and React, with Contentful Headless as CMS and with Elasticsearch for indexing and searching housing data.

We also deliver management and further development of existing services based on Java, React, and Microsoft Azure and DevOps (CI/CD) for hosting. Existing services are migrated to Azure Kubernetes, with Azure API Management at the forefront.

Technologies

The result

With our help, SiO meets the students' expectations of next-level digital services and access to relevant information. We are developing a new digital service platform with integrations with SiO's core systems. What is more SiO launches new student websites for the start of the semester with a new visual digital profile. There is also a launch of new websites for the whole of sio.no scheduled for 2022. We are now in the process of building a housing administrative system for the management of SiO's 9,000 student housing - both for SiO's employees and the students, that would cover the entire student experience from search to allocation, through the period of residence up to moving out.