Presentations from our osAccelerate event in London UK by Mark Brincat, CTO of The Economist and Steve Tanner, Systems Analyst at the World Trade Organisation.

1. World Trade Organization
Steve Tanner - IT Systems Analyst

2. Drupal in an International
Organization. Too good to be true?
Spoiler: no

3. Based in Geneva, Switzerland
World Trade Organization

5. Approximately 700 employees
161 Member Countries
World Trade Organization

6. What Do We Do?
Trade Negotiations
Implementation and Monitoring

7. Dispute Settlement
Building Trade Capacity
What Do We Do?

8. How did Drupal arrive?

9. Why?...
Seemed secure. ‘Free’. Widely used. Urgent need to
move.
Why not?...

10. Drupal is a free and open-source content-management
framework written in PHP and distributed under the GNU
General Public License (Wikipedia).

11. “It’s OK for teenagers in their
bedrooms - but not for serious
projects.”

12. Credibility Issue?

13. Seems not...
https://www.drupal.com/showcases

14. 4 weeks later...

15. Our Drupal Sites
Standards and Trade Development Facility
(STDF)
http://www.standardsfacility.org/

16. STDF
Seeks to improve sanitary capacity in developing countries
which in turn supports sustainable economic growth, poverty
reduction, food security and environmental protection.

18. STDF
Challenge: We needed to integrate a large document library
allowing in-document / faceted searching.

19. Apache Solr with
Drupal Solr Module
Solution...

20. Our Drupal Sites
Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF)
http://www.enhancedif.org/

21. EIF
Supports LDCs to be more active players in the global trading
system by helping them tackle supply-side constraints to
trade and develop sustainable export growth

23. Challenge: We needed a section of the site restricted to
certain login based roles
EIF

24. Drupal Roles and
Permissions
Solution...

25. Trade Facilitation Agreement Facility (TFAF)
http://www.tfafacility.org/
Our Drupal Sites

26. TFAF
Facility to help LDCs implement Trade Facilitation Agreement:
‘Removing red tape’ across customs borders.

28. Challenge: After TF agreement was reached we were asked
to develop a website rapidly as a public resource. Needed to
be trilingual:: English, French and Spanish.
TFAF

29. Internationalization
modules & organizational
learning
Solutions...

30. Cultural Adjustments

31. No Throat To Choke..

32. The Power of Community
Drupal is open source software maintained and developed by
a community of over 1,000,000 users and developers. 31778
free modules (source: Drupal.org)

33. Drupal 8 core has over 2700 contributors.
source: http://xjmdrupal.org/blog/contribution-influence-
drupal-8
The Power of Community

34. DrupalCon

35. Useful Things We’ve Learned
Champions / supportive management essential
Be willing to experiment - it’s free after all!
Modular nature has allowed increasingly rapid and accurate
project management.

36. New ways and a new language.
Git
repos
Tar
ball
Chaos
suite
Blocks
vs
Panels

37. Useful Things We’ve Learned
Auditability. Important when we implemented a link to Active
Directory.
Victims of our own success.

38. Useful Things We’ve Learned
The world is changing (has already changed?) We work with
developers who know nothing else.

39. Thanks!
Any questions?

40. Latest Open Technology Projects
Digital
Transformation

41. • A brief look at the Economist.
• How is the Economist changing to enable digital transformation ?
• What part do Open Source Technologies play in this enablement ?
What we will cover

42. • Smart – Our readers turn to The Economist to make sense of the forces
that shape our future.
• Trusted –The Economist is relied upon as a filter of world affairs.
• Bold – Founded to defend free trade, The Economist is not afraid to
advocate for positive change.
• Global – The only publication with a dedicated section covering every
region in the world, every week.
• Well-written – Readers value The Economist’s distinct style of
intelligence and wit
What Sets the economist apart?

43. We are the antidote for information overload:
We distil news into a ‘finish-able’ package.
The Economist
Newsletter
The Economist
App
Global Business
Review
The Economist
Espresso
Economist.com
Two editorially-
curated newsletters
every week. They
highlight the best of
print and online.
Weekly international
news and business
publication, offering
clear reporting,
commentary and
analysis.
Starts with 10 articles
a month followed by
a singular daily news
analysis read – a
known investment of
time.
The lean-back,
immersive experience
of print. It offers
audio recording and
digital enhancements.
On Demand access to
views, insights, blogs
and events.
A morning briefing
that tells you what’s on
the global agenda in
the coming day.

44. • In 2010 we migrated our website to Drupal 6 and enabled a platform to
deliver all our content, comments and interactive.
• In 2014 we enabled our first daily offering called Espresso powered by
Drupal 7 for its content and a native offering on iOS and Android.
• In 2014 we delivered The World In using a combination of Drupal 7 and
the Pug Pig framework to deliver our experience.
• In 2015 we delivered Intelligent Life using again a combination of
Drupal 7 and the Pug Pig framework
• In 2015 we delivered our first multi-lingual offering. Global Business
Review delivering content in Chinese and English powered by Drupal 7.
We are no stranger to Open Source
Technologies…

45. • Inflexible and slow to change resulting in a reduced ability to grow our
reach.
• Data in siloes providing missed opportunities in targeting our audience
and getting understanding of our customer
• Aging landscape making it difficult to get resources on the ground to
effect change
• A lot of re-work making development and product delivery slow
• Tightly coupled resulting in complex deployment reducing the ability to
introduce new features.
Now we face some challenges
towards digital transformation ?

46. We focused on our
culture…

47. We embraced the following strategy
Be Cloud First
Buy Commodity
and Build
Innovation
Cross Functional
and Product
Centric
Agile Mindset
Value and Data
Driven

48. • We embraced the Cloud, transitioned our core website
to AWS and are actively building our new digital
platforms with Cloud First in mind
• We have focused our development efforts in areas that
enable innovation and looking at SasS to enable
commodity driven requirements
• We focus on iterating, testing and learning. We look at
experimenting, building MVEs and MVPs and use data
to drive our decisions and evolution.
• We transformed our teams into cross functional teams
lead through in house product development.
We transformed our culture
Be Cloud First
Buy Commodity
and Build
Innovation
Cross Functional
and Product
Centric
Agile Mindset
Value and Data
Driven

49. We started our journey….

50. Sales
Introduce Grow Mature Decline Withdraw
We became Product Centric and
Iterative
Experiment
Iterate
MVP

51. • The Economist Online includes a
range of content and interactive
features.
• But this is not the only content
platform….
• World In
• Intelligent Life
• Espresso
• Print Publication
• Debates….
Our Current Content Platform

52. Better Global
UX
Faster Load
Times
Search Engine
Indexability
Free
Progressive
Enhancements
Easier Code
Maintenance
What are we trying to achieve ?
• More people reading more
articles
• Leading to more subscription
conversions
• Increased advertising
inventory
• Plus a better content system
on which to build new
products

53. • Our first experiment in Node,
React and Isomorphic JS
• An average page load of 1.5
seconds down from 7 seconds to
see content above the fold.
• 46 page requests on the first load,
an average of 8 on subsequent
requests, down from over 350
requests
• A nearly seamless experience
when browsing the site
We became Component based

54. • Small autonomous services that work together, can be scaled and
released independently with different teams potentially using different
languages across different locations.
We Introduced Microservices
Autonomous
Modelled
around the
business domain
Small, does one
thing, and does
it well
Owning build
and deployment
Integrates via
well-known
interfaces

55. We embraced GOLang
Performant
•Go should be
able to maintain
connections with
thousands of
users from a
single instance,
without
exhausting
available
memory.
Non Blocking
•The Go runtime
ensures that any
one goroutine
isn't blocking the
others. Code is
written in a
synchronous
style while being
fully non-
blocking. There
is no need for
callbacks, so
there is no
"callback hell."
Scalable
•Go has one
straightforward
model. It
multiplexes onto
OS threads (like
Erlang), and
stacks grow as
needed.
Concurrency
•Atomic Channels
to reinforce that
you should share
memory by
communicating,
instead of
communicating
by sharing
memory. GO
makes it very
easy to
implement
concurrent,
scalable solutions
without race-
conditions
Compilation
•JVM-based
languages are
saddled with
slow startup
times. This
doesn't just affect
auto-scaling and
server restarts. It
can also be
crippling in
development.
•Go applications
compile quickly
and launch
immediately.
https://github.com/EconomistDigitalSolutions/goberry

56. From Idea to
Production
• Automate as much as
possible
• Rapid feedback loop
• Version everything
• Introduced tooling to
support speed.
We Embraced CI and CD
Version
Control
Start with
API
Build
ImageProvision
Execute
• Team
• JIRA and Confluence
• Slack for Team Communication
• Tools our Build Pipeline
• We use GIT for source and
configuration
• Jenkins to support CI
• GOCD for CD
• RPM for GO binaries
• NPM for Node binaries
• Packer for Image Creation
• Consul for Service Discovery
• Salt for Configuration Management

57. Product 1
C D
A B
Product ..
n
C E
A B Externals
Blog Comments ImagesPrint
Micro Services
API
Content
Repository
REST/JSON
PHP/Drupal
Front End Experience
CCI Other
Our
Content
Platform
Transformed

58. What are we trying to achieve ?
• We can start testing our new experience by bringing the platform to a
subset of our consumers enabling us to test, learn, adapt and improve
our experience.
• We are able to deliver content to different content aggregators and
mobile applications increasing our reach.
• We are able to build products using these components and focus only on
building what we need different for the product. Speed to Market is
increased
• We will have a continuous delivery mechanism to deliver our platforms
enabling us to release more often and get value earlier.

59. But we are not stopping
there…

60. We are transforming our customer
platform.
• Current subscription management tool is not flexible for digital
subscription management
• Current marketing and eCommerce tool is not flexible and costly to add
new features (time and money)
• Current access control platform outdated, near impossible to maintain,
unpredictable, data unreliable
• Tough integration with other systems / apps

61. Call Customer
Care
Compare
Offers
Talk to
Friends
Review
offers
Interact with
Banner Ads
& search
Evaluates
Offers
Evaluate
Evaluates choices,
products, prices,
offers and discounts
Clicks
& reviews
Hits
Reg Wall
Registers
Hits
Paywall
Decides
to Interact
Past
Experiences
Continue
exploring
articles
OFFLINE
Place order
with
Call Center
Get Confirmation
Email
Adjust,
Upgrade,
Manage -
Call
Self
Service
Account
Share
experience
Interact
Decides to buy
or try
Content &
newsletters
Personalization
& relevance
Buys
Purchase and
gets access
ONLINE
Buy
Get access
Activate &
Get access
Engage
Use and Share
Experience
Decides
to BuyShould I
renew ?
Get
Confirmation
Email
Consume
Looked at the Customer Experience

62. What are we looking to achieve ?
• Improve the digital customer journey
• Deliver cross platform integration of customer, their products, marketing
pages, eCommerce, data analytics
• Accurate master data which we own
• Reduce cost of digital subscription management
• Improve marketing opportunities

63. A Best of Breed Approach
Login
BI
Customer
Hub
Fulfillment
Tagging
Omniture tracking
Content consumption
DMP
Circulation &
Activation
Data Warehouse
Media
Data Warehouse
Finance
GL feed
BillingMarketing
CMS
A&E
Email
Mulesoft powering our
cloud service bus
enabling process
orchestration and
integration
Salesforce becoming our
central hub for
customer data putting
the customer at the
heart of our platform.
EZPublish enabling our
Marketing Offers and
Online Acquisition
Journey.
Gluu providing our
Identity and Access
Management.
Zuora enabling
subscription and
recurring billing.

64. What will the platform give us
• More choice for subscription types
• Seamless cross-platform device access
• Accurate access control
• Wider payment options
• Deeper self-service capability
• Improved Product Portfolio capability
• Rapid landing page / offer template setup
• Synchronize rather than reconcile data
• And much more…

65. • We have transformed our culture and strategy to enable digital
transformation.
• We enabled continuous integration so we can iterate, adapt, test and
learn
• We embraced a best of breed approach to our technology landscape
focusing on buying commodity and building innovation
• We continue to embrace Open Technology where appropriate to enable
our digital capability.
In Conclusion