World Trade Organization

Steve Tanner - IT Systems Analyst

Drupal in an InternationalOrganization. Too good to be true?

Spoiler: no

Based in Geneva, Switzerland

World Trade Organization

Approximately 700 employees

161 Member Countries

World Trade Organization

What Do We Do?

Trade Negotiations

Implementation and Monitoring

Dispute Settlement

Building Trade Capacity

What Do We Do?

How did Drupal arrive?

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

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

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

Credibility Issue?

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

4 weeks later...

Our Drupal Sites

Standards and Trade Development Facility (STDF)

http://www.standardsfacility.org/

STDF

Seeks to improve sanitary capacity in developing countries which in turn supports sustainable economic growth, poverty

reduction, food security and environmental protection.

STDF

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

Apache Solr with Drupal Solr Module

Solution...

Our Drupal Sites

Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF)

http://www.enhancedif.org/

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

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

EIF

Drupal Roles and Permissions

Solution...

Trade Facilitation Agreement Facility (TFAF)

http://www.tfafacility.org/

Our Drupal Sites

TFAF

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

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

Internationalization modules & organizational learning

Solutions...

Cultural Adjustments

No Throat To Choke..

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)

Drupal 8 core has over 2700 contributors. source: http://xjmdrupal.org/blog/contribution-influence-

drupal-8

The Power of Community

DrupalCon

Useful Things We’ve Learned

Champions / supportive management essentialBe willing to experiment - it’s free after all!Modular nature has allowed increasingly rapid and accurate project management.

New ways and a new language.

Git repos

Tar ball

Chaos suite

Blocks vs Panels

Useful Things We’ve Learned

Auditability. Important when we implemented a link to Active Directory.

Victims of our own success.

Useful Things We’ve Learned

The world is changing (has already changed?) We work with developers who know nothing else.

Thanks!

Any questions?

Latest Open Technology Projects

Digital Transformation

• 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

• 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?

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.

• 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…

• 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 ?

We focused on our culture…

We embraced the following strategy

Be Cloud FirstBuy

Commodity and Build Innovation

Cross Functional

and Product Centric

Agile Mindset Value and Data Driven

• 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 cultureBe Cloud First

Buy Commodity and Build Innovation

Cross Functional and

Product Centric

Agile Mindset

Value and Data Driven

We started our journey….

Sale

s

Introduce Grow Mature Decline Withdraw

We became Product Centric and Iterative

Experiment

Iterate

MVP

• 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

Better Global UX

Faster Load Times

Search Engine

Indexability

Free Progressive Enhanceme

nts

Easier Code Maintenanc

e

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

• 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

• 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

AutonomousModelled

around the business domain 

Small, does one thing, and does it well 

Owning build and

deployment 

Integrates via well-known interfaces 

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

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

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 PlatformTransformed

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.

But we are not stopping there…

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

Call Customer Care

Compare Offers

Talk to Friends

Review offers

Interact with Banner Ads

& search

EvaluatesOffers

EvaluateEvaluates choices, products, prices, offers and discounts

Clicks & reviews

Hits Reg Wall

Registers

Hits Paywall

Decidesto Interact

Past Experiences

Continue exploring articles

OFFLINE Place order with Call Center

Get Confirmation Email

Adjust, Upgrade, Manage - Call

Self ServiceAccount

Share experience

InteractDecides to buy or try

Content & newsletters

Personalization & relevance

BuysPurchase and gets access

ONLINEBuy

Get access

Activate & Get access

EngageUse and Share Experience

Decidesto BuyShould I

renew ?

Get Confirmation Email

Consume

Looked at the Customer Experience

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

A Best of Breed Approach

LoginBI

Customer Hub

FulfillmentTagging

Omniture trackingContent consumption

DMP

Circulation & ActivationData Warehouse

Media Data Warehouse

Finance

GL feed

BillingMarketingCMSA&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.

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…

• 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