Killing the legacy: End-to-end platform modernisation at pace

The context

Our client, a financial services company aims to provide their 30+ brands access to a cost-effective, secure, and easy-to-use platform to manage their web presence. 

Stability and usability issues were giving the platform a bad reputation, and the cost to onboard new sites was prohibitive.

The legacy platform was out of support, increasingly costly to maintain and had a high risk profile due to security and stability concerns. A rapid migration was imperative, while at the same time it was crucial to demonstrate significant improvements to employee and customer experiences to create positive sentiment around the launch of the new platform.

With our assistance the client had made a business case for change, and put in place technology foundations for a new platform. They were concerned that they did not have the necessary experience or capacity in-house to execute the migration effectively and asked arcast to assist. 

Value-driven delivery 

We worked with stakeholders to define a clear migration roadmap, giving every team the visibility and confidence to plan ahead. Complexity would be built up iteratively: At the start, simple low traffic, low content-volume sites with fewer integrations would be migrated, finishing with sites with over 500 pages and full digital self-service features.

This enabled a stable foundation to be proven in production, before higher value/risk sites were delivered. Lessons learned from each go-live were fed into the next iteration and operational teams onboarded an increasingly broad integration architecture, as search, content delivery network (CDN), forms, customer relationship management (CRM) and e-commerce capabilities were added to the stack.

For each site, a careful analysis was executed using analytics data such as page views, engagement and content freshness. This was combined with employee and customer feedback to deliver impact-focussed backlogs for development, migration and content creation teams.

By dropping ineffective and low volume pages and features, it was possible to focus on only high-impact improvements. This enabled genuine business value to be delivered while staying within the timeline and budgets, which had been determined assuming an as-is migration.

Data-driven migration with automation at the core

Arcast used proprietary content analysis tooling to extract detailed insights on the distribution and relationships between content within the legacy platform. By layering this together with web analytics  and metadata from the CMS we were able to build a profile of content engagement, freshness and diversity. 

This data was used to drive business decisions about what content required rewrite, what should be migrated as-is and what could be dropped. It also enabled us to execute a pragmatic migration process with automation at the core, plus human oversight to manage any areas of complexity.

Across all sites over a thousand pages were migrated (even after a 50% reduction in content volume), with automation enabling the timelines to be reduced from several months to just a few weeks.

Modernised solution architecture with reducing operating cost

Our client was running on-premise infrastructure for their legacy platform, which was becoming increasingly complex and costly to maintain. Their software provider proposed migrating to their cloud offering, however this process was complex and SaaS subscriptions ran into 6 figures.

By focusing on SaaS products based around open source technology which integrated well with our clients Azure/.NET technology stack, we created a modernised solution architecture. Arcast guided the procurement process to ensure the correct vendor subscriptions were negotiated.

Operating in the heavily regulated financial services industry meant the platform had to adhere to high standards in terms of compliance, architecture and security. Arcast ensured the platform design passed through necessary review boards and approval processes and was fully understood by all necessary stakeholders.

The resulting platform is stable, secure and scalable, delivers a 80% reduction in tech spend, and is ready to deliver further economies of scale: New sites and users can be added with very low increases in running costs.

The Impact

All sites were migrated within budget, on time, and with high quality. Almost immediately the benefits of the new platform could be seen:

• Engaged customers - Key journeys have been redesigned resulting in improved engagement. Pages load in less than a second, down from 5-10 seconds and seasonal peaks can be handled without issues.
• Reinvigorated teams - The new platform gives a 5x productivity boost for editors and triples the level of website control, resulting in a reduced dependency on IT for small changes.
• Rapid decommissioning - Arcast led a rapid and effective decommissioning program, resulting in just 10 months of dual platform running cost.
• Reduced costs - we ensured the client negotiated just what was needed from their SaaS vendors resulting in an 80% reduction in tech spend. 

With the old platform fully decommissioned within a year, our client can now look firmly forward to onboard further sites and continuously improve on solid foundations without the dragging effect of legacy on focus, motivation and costs.

The arcast effect

At the heart of this success was Arcast’s M-shaped consulting model: Versatile experts who bridge strategy, design, and engineering to deliver end-to-end transformation. A core team of just six consultants provided continuity throughout the whole program from initiation to successful delivery. 

During program execution we ensured continuous involvement of our client’s teams so they understood why decisions were made and the way things work. It’s important to us that clients feel ownership of the solutions we provide and are not “locked-in” - dependent on us due to lack of knowledge or understanding. We want clients to continue to work with us because they value it, rather than they are forced to.