The Economist is one of the most widely recognised and well-read current affairs publications, with a growing global circulation of around 1.5m readers and a reputation for incisive analysis and opinion on every aspect of world events.
New digital and business transformation
In 2016, The Economist started a new digital transformation initiative, the CASE (Customer-Access Subscription-Ecommerce) programme – one of the biggest technology undertakings in the history of the company.
The project has five work streams undertaken by a cross-functional team of marketing, finance, technology, business analysts, and project managers.
The work streams are (a) Sales Management and Ecommerce (b) Access, Entitlements, and Paywalls (c) Subscription Management and Revenue Management (d) CRM and Customer Service (e) Data Migration, Business Intelligence, and Reporting.
Complex technology stack
The CASE platform has Salesforce sales, service, and Marketing Cloud as a central hub with other products hanging off it.
The other products that were added to the ecosystem are eZ Publish as the CMS and Ecommerce platform, Zuora as the Subscription Management and billing platform, Gluu as a Single Sign-On platform, CyberSource for credit card payments, GoCardless for direct debit, GBG for address and email validation, Piano for paywall, and they are all connected by MuleSoft’s Enterprise Service Bus.
Goals
The general goal of CASE is to improve customer experience, increase buyer flow conversions, increase time to market, enable the ability to easily cross-sell, and to provide predictable access control to readers.
TESTIMONIALS
Chief Executive Officer (Capital Economics)
The project Eugi led was challenging, made all the more so by the Capital Economics’ inexperience and sometimes reticence to digitise our services. He coped with this as calmly as he could have and soldiered on, delivering the lion share of what ended up being a valuable new platform.
Director, Digital Development (PEI Media)
Eugi was instrumental in helping our team at PEI Media understand and implement new agile ways of working and related governance/processes. He’s also programme managed a complicated multi-track tech development roadmap.
Chief Technology Officer (The Economist)
Eugi held a key role in understanding the complex processes and ways of working that had developed in the Economist over the course of multiple years. I found Eugi to be proactive, result oriented, responsible and technically sound and he is always ready to put all his energy and time to get the job done. He has exceptional troubleshooting, coordination and analytical skills.
Business Change Director (The Economist)
Eugi’s attitude and ability led to him becoming more involved in delivery of the requirements he had helped shape and get approved. His understanding, interest and enthusiasm for working agile helped shape the cross-functional team he managed, gaining the trust and respect of everyone he worked with.