FT CPIO Christina Scott on the FT's big web refresh and legacy migration

Financial Times chief product and information officer Christina Scott discusses a major website redesign, and the IT work necessary to manage the brand's transition to new owners

The Financial Times (FT) was sold by publishing group Pearson to Japanese media firm Nikkei for £844m in July this year. But when Computing caught up with the FT's CPIO (the ‘P' stands for Product, and we'll come back to the title later) Christina Scott in August she didn't cite the technological disentanglement from her brand's previous owners as her top challenge, instead pointing to a website redesign project.

Dubbed "Project Next", the redesign has the FT's readers - or customers, in Scott's parlance - at its core.

"We haven't redesigned FT.com for years. The old design, which was rolled out around eight years ago, looks like a newspaper online, and we've only really tweaked it since," says Scott. "So this is the first time we've done a big redesign and thought about the customer."

The new site is already live, and visitors to FT.com are invited to try it, whilst still bring free to bounce back to the old version if they prefer.

Scott explains that the process behind the project is the exciting part, involving small, agile teams, with readers invited in to test the latest functionality each week during the (currently ongoing) alpha phase of the project.

"We've been running rapid start-up processes around different business issues, like advertising and B2B, and the idea is that the new design should work well for people coming in from search and social media."

Eight years ago when the FT's website was first designed, the concept of people landing directly in an article because they'd seen a journalist tweet about it didn't exist. The user journey was all about starting from the home page, finding an interesting article then clicking on it - a process that's not dissimilar from how we all read newspapers.

Today, most media brands experience large volumes of traffic diving straight into articles rather than starting at the home page, and Scott explains that the redesign tries to give users the best experience in each article, then aims to provide a good onward journey, ideally staying within the FT's domain, from there.

Project Next has also introduced engagement as a new metric by which the FT's editorial output, and indeed web presence itself, should be judged.

"We decided that engagement is what drives subscription and advertising revenue," says Scott. "So we looked at recency, frequency and volume [of traffic], and the data science team have come up with a way of combining all three. Everything we're doing is trying to drive engagement with a view to increasing revenue."

And it's this engagement metric that will determine Project Next's official launch date, rather than a semi-arbitrary end date being produced from a standard workflow on a GANTT chart.

"Instead of pinning a date on the launch, we said when we have increased the engagement of our readership by a certain percentage, then the new site is good enough for us to switch off the old one. Which is quite cool!"

She adds that even though the new site currently just has a minimum of functionality compared to the old version, the brand's audience appear to prefer it, stating that the engagement is already higher on the redesigned site.

But there are still headaches, like deciding what to keep and what to leave out from the old domain.

"There's so much on the old site, so the challenge is not to chuck it all in there and replicate something that's grown over many years. We have to be certain that everything works for the customers," says Scott.

Introducing metadata

While some unwanted functionality and clutter will inevitably be discarded in the redesign work, one area set to expand hugely in the new site is metadata. Scott says her team has focused heavily on metadata, with the aim being to recognise and more accurately profile a far greater proportion of the FT's online readership.

"Before [the redesign] we would recognise around 15,000 people, and we've now got 4.3 million people in the ontology [a system holding audience records]. So the metadata is much richer in terms of pure volume, but also in terms of the linking we're now able to determine. So you can follow people written about in an article, you can follow the topic, location, or country," says Scott.

"We also have information on the key people at certain companies, so you can look at a firm and understand the main people who are on its board. So customers can get to information that's relevant to them. They might have come to the article because they're interested in a certain company, then they'll find people they want to read about. So we developed the ‘My FT' section where you can follow whatever you want," she adds.

Scott has been building out the FT's data capabilities for many years, describing data as her principal area of focus the last time Computing caught up with her in May 2014. Having already recruited a team of data scientists, and moved the brand's data warehouse to Amazon Redshift, she now says she is thinking more about the value of the data, which types the brand should be collecting.

"There have been some fascinating insights the data has given us," she explains. "Like we found that 10 per cent of our subscribers are actually featured in FT articles, which maybe isn't that surprising, but we now have the data to prove it. So you begin to see the possibilities around breadth of the data.

FT CPIO Christina Scott on the FT's big web refresh and legacy migration

Financial Times chief product and information officer Christina Scott discusses a major website redesign, and the IT work necessary to manage the brand's transition to new owners

And she's very positive about the results of the move to Amazon Redshift, which happened around a year ago. The move has so far provided in the region of £800,000 of cost savings, which Scott says represents about 80 per cent of the cost of the service, but for her the more important result is that the performance has been much better.

"We've always had the data science team who are able to provide reports, but we've been trying to democratise that data, and we want anyone to have access to it, and to have tools that are easy for self-service. We introduced Birst, which has proved to be okay for the data scientists, but less good for the general users, as it was too complicated for them. So we've now chosen a new tool for them called Chartio," she says.

Scott has also rolled out Salesforce as a way of managing subscribers, and plans to decommission its predecessor, Erights, which the FT has used for the past decade, by the end of the year. From the sounds of things, it won't be missed.

"We'll have a big party when we decommission it!" she laughs. "It's a legacy system, nobody understands it any more. But on the whole the membership platform has been very good, and we've put things on top like direct debit as new payment method, and spent time focusing on payment optimisation and payment and account gateways. The problem is that if you lose a customer because their payment fails, it's so much harder to get them back, so it's better to ensure the payment doesn't fail."

She says her next focus will be mobile payments. "You can subscribe to the FT on your mobile, but you can't pay via an app. We did look at it a year ago, but felt the technology wasn't quite ready. It's probably getting closer now."

Scott adds that while the systems have been updated to allow foreign currencies to be used, Bitcoin, for now, won't be accepted.

Reducing the footprint and a change of ownership

So those are her main priorities for the moment, and looking ahead to 2016 Scott describes "reducing the physical footprint" as a key task, with a desire to move as much infrastructure as possible into the cloud.

However, there are some systems that it seems will remain untouched for the foreseeable future.

"We still have some Sun Solaris boxes, and we don't want to touch them. They're very old so we just leave them be! Some software like our content management system is not able to be put into the cloud yet, but the company is in the process of enabling that. So we still have some legacy systems, but there's definitely a big push to move more into the cloud."

Operating more cloud services and less physical kit should make the move to new owners and eventually new premises (the building currently used by the FT is owned by its previous parent firm, Pearson) simpler. The sale itself, Scott says, was facilitated by the fact that the FT had previously rolled out Gmail internally.

"We like Gmail a lot," she says. "We also use Google Docs, and it was perfect for the work we had to do for the sale - pulling lots of information together, and having small groups of people working and collaborating on that. Trying to do that with Word or Excel would've been a nightmare."

Scott describes her work leading up to the sale as "due diligence around the technology systems". It involved pulling together information around every system, including how it is used, and how it interacts with other systems.

"It was amazing how much information we already had, I was really impressed with my team. We had pretty much everything covered, there was just about nothing we had to go and write, which was quite amazing really."

And Scott's correct to label that fact as amazing. The vast majority of organisations, especially those who have been around for over 125 years like the FT, will find all sorts of little-used but somehow essential back-end systems crawling out of the woodwork when they perform a full-scale audit. But according to Scott, there wasn't even any evidence of shadow IT - users procuring software and systems on their own without any central authorisation.

"There's no shadow IT here. There has been in the past, as when I joined there were still bits of technology run independently, but over time it's all gradually come together."

Though having said that, she does add: "I'm going to get caught out aren't I at some point."

CIO + Product = CPIO

Finally, Scott turns to her role, and the slightly unusual CPIO title. She explains that it came about because there was a gap between the technology area and the FT's products, exemplified by the fact that the product teams were organisationally positioned within the B2C part of the business - which is a slightly clunky way to do things when you want to roll out B2B products.

"It's been good because it [the CPIO role] has helped to drive a number of things. We've been thinking about technology strategy for a while, but we wanted a product strategy, which I said we couldn't have without a customer strategy. And we've never had an articulated customer strategy other than ‘everyone who'll pay'! Which really isn't that focused."

That customer strategy has involved research into different customer types.

"The research is happening as an agile process. We've taken a customer segment which we've never targeted before, and seeing whether by targeting that segment we can drive a better outcome in terms of engagement and revenues than we had before with our slightly more scattergun approach."

If that proves fruitful, the plan then is to decide which other customer segments the brand should focus on over the next couple of years. And that involves understanding who is most likely to pay for the FT's products (including subscribing to its editorial).

"So we've had profiles of typical customers, but we've never said these are the people who are of most value and we're going to target. It's a missed opportunity because we're writing some amazing content, for example around oil and gas. But we're not tying up with our external messaging - marketing aren't telling the energy sector that we have some amazing editorial coming up for them. So joining up with marketing will make a lot of sense.

"And when we started thinking about it, everything should be tied up to what we're doing with our products. We need to understand what we're doing editorially and how best to use that in our marketing messages. We now have an audience engagement team in editorial, and a very active communications team, so they can now be more proactive. It's just joining it all up."

She argues that the "product" side of her role is one that needs to understand all sides of the business, whether that's editorial, commercial, advertising, subscriptions or technology.

"The role needs to be able to articulate all the requirements and understand the best way to meet them. It's not purely driven by editorial because we are trying to make money, and it's not purely driven by commercial because there's editorial independence.

"The key thing that we've never done before is to put the customer at the core, the whole business needs to understand that it's about the customer. And that's the person consuming our content to do their jobs, that's the customer to us."

@StuartSumner