Breaking with the past: an interview with Pearson CTO/COO Albert Hitchcock
London-based global publisher and education provider Pearson is undergoing perhaps the biggest business transformation in its 172-year history. Stuart Sumner meets the man tasked with creating the 'Netflix of education', CTO and COO Albert Hitchcock
Sitting on the north bank of the Thames in central London, the headquarters of global publisher and education provider Pearson was once one of Winston Churchill's wartime haunts. Churchill allegedly used to puff his iconic cigars on one of the roof terraces during air raids, watching the Luftwaffe as they tracked up the river, the city itself shrouded in darkness thanks to the blackout.
When Computing meets Pearson CTO and COO Albert Hitchcock there are no warplanes in sight, just the dazzlingly bright September sun. And Hitchcock himself may not have a war to win, but with a huge digital transformation project currently underway, there will be many battles ahead.
"We're transforming the business in every way through the use of technology," begins Hitchcock. "When I joined the business a little over two years ago, it became quite evident to me within a short period of time that we had an incredibly complex tech estate because the company had grown through acquisition over many decades, and had acquired a very diverse set of businesses," he says.
Simplifying and unifying
Pearson effectively ran as a holding company for a set of federated businesses. This strategy changed when current CEO John Fallon joined three years ago, and the decision was made to bring the company together into a more recognisable corporate structure, with enabling functions.
But this change needed to be facilitated by technology. The company was never going to come together as a single unit while it operated a dizzying array of separate systems.
"The technology landscape within the firm mirrored the old way of working, so we had to fundamentally change the way technology served the business," says Hitchcock. "Within a couple of months I created a technology strategy that basically looked to radically simplify the business, and enable efficiency and cost reduction. At the same time we recognised that the digital customer experience was really the thing that was going to drive the top-line revenue growth. It became evident that we needed to bring the customer-facing and product technology strategy together with the enterprise and systems-enabling strategy.
"We did that, and I inherited the digital product development group in the same time period. We didn't want to look at these aspects of technology differently, but all together."
So from this strategy the vision for a single IT architecture for the entire company was born, built around the idea of creating a set of enabling platforms. Part of this vision is to deliver all of Pearson's education content and services via a single platform, in a push to become what Hitchcock describes as the "Netflix of education".
His vision is to stitch together the group's existing education services under one platform using APIs. The company currently operates a diverse set of education services via a large number of different platforms, most of which require separate access credentials.
This is a result of the firm's long-term growth via acquisition, and is something Hitchcock is working hard to change.
"In the past we created separate digital products that have been very successful in their own right, but they're unique instances of products. Now the approach is to create effectively a single platform," he said.
"The analogy I use is to be the Netflix for education. We want to create a single platform to deliver all educational content and services, irrespective of the age and stage of the pupil," said Hitchcock.
"The other aspect is to make that platform very future-proof, to create a micro-services, API-based architecture that enables us to deliver all of our customer experiences through that single mechanism.
"Much as you would consume movies through Netflix, or buy services through Amazon, we want education to be delivered through this single, quality user experience, but available to all ages and stages of learners."
Breaking with the past: an interview with Pearson CTO/COO Albert Hitchcock
London-based global publisher and education provider Pearson is undergoing perhaps the biggest business transformation in its 172-year history. Stuart Sumner meets the man tasked with creating the 'Netflix of education', CTO and COO Albert Hitchcock
Hitchcock explains that this vision requires a new way of thinking at the company.
"That's quite an all-encompassing vision and it gets us to think through the whole way we run and structure the business," he says.
"The strategy is to put the platform at the centre of our business, and have all the operational processes run around the platform. So it's a radically different approach from the way the company worked in the past."
The same goes for the enterprise tools the company uses. Again as a result of this growth by acquisition, the firm used to employ 63 separate ERP systems, with both Oracle and SAP representing the largest providers within the estate, but many others also present.
Hitchcock tells Computing that the decision was made to go with Oracle, despite his previous experience with SAP.
"We were split evenly between Oracle and SAP before I joined the firm, with lots of other vendors providing other systems too. I'd previously worked extensively with SAP, having implemented their systems into both Nortel and Vodafone," says Hitchcock.
"But we looked at the demographic at Pearson, and decided to go with Oracle in the end," he adds.
Hitchcock says that he has recently implemented Oracle's Fusion product for various Pearson departments.
"Oracle Fusion has just successfully gone live this summer in the UK business for supply chain management, finance and HR. We'll implement it for the global HR teams towards the end of this year, so we'll have all employees on one single HR environment, then roll it out for the US next year," he explains.
This is part of a broader push in the firm towards a "single instance" approach, with the firm previously finding itself with a large number of systems performing similar functions, with no single view of data or customers.
"That will be a continuation of our single instance approach," says Hitchcock. "Oracle house the system in their cloud, so we're moving to a cloud-based ecosystem. We want as little infrastructure on premise as possible."
And the same process is occurring elsewhere, with the firm previously employing over 40 different CRM systems, and consolidating down to just Salesforce.
"We had multiple versions of Salesforce.com in every country," says Hitchcock. "So we said the first thing we need to do is get a plan to get a single CRM system to go with our single ERP, and start to bring together a single view of all data, both the financial and HR data that runs the business, but also as it relates to our customers.
"And in a similar vein we kicked off a unified identity management approach to capture a single identity for all of our customers, to replace the model which existed before where every learner identity was different in separate systems. So we had no single view of customer identity, or behaviour, or customer choice."
Another area badly in need of consolidation was the group's web estate, with over 20,000 domains today on the public internet, and more than 2,000 unique websites. The decision was made to bring it together into a single web presence on pearson.com, effectively to create a single front door to all digital experiences in the company.
At the same time the group is changing all authoring, editorial, and content creation processes to be HTML5, mobile-first, and completely automated.
"In the past our whole content creation was based around book publishing, so it was an analogue model, with digital as an adjunct. We turned the whole thing on its head to become a digital-first and mobile-first publishing model.
"If we want to publish books, that's just an output from the digital process."
Creating an AI teacher
One of the benefits of all of this digital, web and identity unification is that machine learning can be used in order to select and offer appropriate learning content for each user.
"We're starting to metatag all the content, so it can be chopped up into component parts, and then be reassembled on the fly [for each user]," explains Hitchcock.
Breaking with the past: an interview with Pearson CTO/COO Albert Hitchcock
London-based global publisher and education provider Pearson is undergoing perhaps the biggest business transformation in its 172-year history. Stuart Sumner meets the man tasked with creating the 'Netflix of education', CTO and COO Albert Hitchcock
He likened it to the techniques used by firms such as Google in selecting which ad to display online, based on its understanding of each user.
"But our use case it much richer. We're changing the nature of the content, so we need deeper analytics, and we use Pearson's unique IP [intellectual property] to modify that learning content on the fly," he says.
"I think we're seeing some really interesting things in machine learning. The platforms are teaching themselves how to come up with suggestions. It's exciting and frightening."
When asked which machine learning platform the group would select, he says it would likely choose several.
"We will probably in the future end up plugged into multiple machine learning environments, and we'll just choose whichever result is the best [in each case]. So we'll consume various machine learning services, and choose the most accurate answer based on real-time feedback," he says.
In fact, in Hitchcock's view, machine learning can completely replace that hardest of roles to recruit, the data scientist.
"The days of writing to a Hadoop database and have a data scientist write algorithms are rapidly disappearing," says Hitchcock. "We just put the data into a machine learning platform, and it spots the patterns."
Selling change
This all amounts to a lot of change, so how hard was it for Hitchcock to sell the idea to the business? He explains that the messaging was well received at senior levels, but less so further down the hierarchy.
"The board of directors absolutely bought into the vision. Lincoln Wallen, the CTO of Dreamworks, recently joined as non-executive director, and he was a useful advocate on the board. They absolutely support the transformation, and John Fallon and the executive team too. Where you tend to run into roadblocks is as you go down layers in organisations. Some people are more set in their ways, so getting the fabric of the organisation changed is a challenge."
As with any large change programme, it's the cultural element that is the most challenging aspect. Despite the need to join up and simplify such a huge wealth of systems and applications, Hitchcock describes the technology as "reasonably straightforward".
"There are some things we're doing which are quite bleeding edge, but some of it, you could look at platform companies like Google and Amazon and say they've already done it, so it's down to us to plagiarise to a certain extent."
But perhaps the technology only seems simple by comparison with the need to bring a huge workforce along on the journey.
"People are at the heart of it," he says. "It's not just the business people; we have to take the technology people on the journey as well. Arguably when I started we didn't have the right leadership attributes within technology. We've put a lot of work into bringing in a new breed of technology leader, but also to develop the people who were here previously as well.
"We've put a lot of focus on leadership development, skills development, and training to get the technology organisation up to the right level needed to lead this change," says Hitchcock.
Churchill's challenges may have come with graver consequences, but it seems that the roof terraces at Pearson's HQ are set for a few more years of thoughtful pacing yet.
@StuartSumner
• Albert Hitchcock is among the UK's leading IT professionals, being ranked 43 in Computing 's Top 100 CIOs list. A revised list will be announced at the IT Leaders Summit on 7 December. For details click here