CIO Interview: Mark Ridley, Group CTO, Blenheim Chalcot
Ridley explains how learning provider Avado transformed everything except its IT team and found success
Former reed.co.uk CIO Mark Ridley joined startup accelerator Blenheim Chalcot in November 2016. Since then he has spent much of his time with digital learning provider Avado, and has been part of a programme which saw the firm transform just about every aspect of its IT in 2017.
In fact, just about the only thing which didn't change, according to Ridley, was the IT team itself.
He recently told Computing about the components needed to make up the perfect team.
"We refreshed pretty much everything in 2017," says Ridley. "For a start we moved to new offices on the new Imperial College campus in White City, away from dingy offices in Hammersmith."
The new office space is bright and airy, with free fruit available in the large kitchen. Ridley helped to design the layout, and is an advocate of teams eating together. The kitchen also doubles as a breakout area and presentation space, coming complete with a projector - one of the only things in the office which isn't wireless.
"It doesn't matter how much you spend on wireless projectors, they never seem to work," he adds.
There are phone booths, the size of an old BT phone kiosk, but with a folding table for a laptop, which both provides a quite space for a call, and massively frees up meeting rooms.
But it's the platforms upon which the business runs, and the way the IT team works, which have seen the biggest changes.
Transforming CRM and BI
"We chose Salesforce as our CRM tool," says Ridley. "We also trialled Microsoft Dynamics 365, but went with Salesforce because it was the one the users wanted.
"We're implementing Service Cloud first," he continues. "We're getting the service desk users on the platform first, as they currently don't have a ticketing system.
"One of the big process recommendations that I make, if you have a group of people dealing with incoming requests on email, you move to a ticketing system as soon as you can. It doesn't matter what the ticketing system is, they'll all give an improvement.
"So the business technology team have rolled out FreshDesk to HR, finance and some of the product teams, to replace the Atlassian service desk product.
"We looked at ZenDesk, which is one of my personal preferences. But FreshDesk was much more competitive on price, and very close on features. So we went with FreshDesk and rolled it out across lots of teams."
He explains that Hubspot will continue to be used for marketing automation.
"Our users really like Hubspot, so there's no real need to replace it, it has a great experience. It does its job very well, but on the CRM side it doesn't support international users quite as well, so we've decided to bring in Salesforce so people can share leads anywhere in the world and have a consistent product set. We'll put in a first-class integration between Hubspot marketing automation and Salesforce."
The next piece of work will be migrating all Avado's legacy data.
"As with any business that's been running systems for a while, there's lots of customisations that have happened, and when you look at it you wouldn't do it the same way again.
"When we look at the type of data that's been stored on the CRM, there are probably better systems for storing it. Things like a data warehousing, reporting, analytics, and that leads us to another 2018 project which is to look at BI [business intelligence]."
Ridley adds that he is intending to democratise business intelligence at Avado, giving everyone access to the data they need to make decisions. According to him, teams at the organisation are keen to run their own queries, and "crying out for this sort of access".
He continues: "We really want to push self-service BI, both internally and for our clients. We want a platform where we can actually look across all the data sources we have, bring them in to a data warehouse, then have a single BI platform which we can use internally."
He explains that this process should work right through the company, with everyone from senior management through to sales teams and clients able to access their information.
"We use Qlik now, and as part of that if moving everything to the cloud and making it available externally, there's potential we might look at Qlicksense.
"But there are other providers in the market and we need to go through them. Vendors like Tableau, Birst, Bime and Qlik Sense [are potentially in the running], but we haven't made any decisions yet.
"What we do know is that we really want something that can sit across the top of a data warehouse that will probably be in the cloud. Then it will provide good, secure reporting for lots of different use cases."
But do users really want to run queries themselves?
"There is absolutely appetite for self-service among the users. I've rolled out similar programmes before and seen that people are just hungry for data. The trick is to ensure you've got a strong BI team.
"The BI administrators or the people responsible for BI tooling, they need to be able to produce all the dashboards. If I'm going to produce this dashboard, it needs to make sense to end users. Ideally you want people to explore anything they have the permission to explore. And they will then find things that you didn't even know existed.
"So I'm a big believer in giving as much power as you can to end users, because they'll surface amazing things," says Ridley.
[Next page: Becoming the destination for Moodle developers]
CIO Interview: Mark Ridley, Group CTO, Blenheim Chalcot
Ridley explains how learning provider Avado transformed everything except its IT team and found success
Becoming the destination for Moodle developers, and doing DevOps
Avado has used open source learning development platform Moodle for a number of years, but its implementation was far from optimal, which resulted in slow performance for users.
"Moodle is a very well respected open source platform, but we were hosting it on Windows. At the time it was chosen it wasn't a bit part of what the company did, but as we became a real digital-first learning business, we suddenly started relying on it more and more heavily, so the combination of Moodle on Windows just didn't work together - PHP on Windows is never good."
One of Ridley's main tasks when he joined Avado was to improve its speed.
"I came in with a different perspective and saw an issue: if you're running Moodle on PHP, and everything is designed around using it on Linux, then we should look at Linux. So one of the first things I did was to look at the platform migration. How do we continue to support Moodle, but do it in a much more elastic, modern way?
"So I ran lots of performance tests against the two platforms, working with the engineering team, and when I went back to the board, again with the benefit of being new, I was able to walk in and say ‘I can address your performance issues with the platform and allow you to scale it going forwards', because there was a concern that if we grow much more it would be a problem.
"I said I can solve the performance problem, but there are some caveats. Yes we can increase performance by two-fold or more by moving to a different platform, but what I can't do is take some of the manual processes we've got in the Windows platform that have been inherited, and move them on to this new Linux platform."
He explains that this entailed moving to a DevOps mindset, including build, testing and release automation and configuration management.
"Working in a DevOps way was something the team knew they wanted to do, but carving out the time and getting it prioritised was really difficult."
Some organisations lose staff when they initiate a major cultural shift like DevOps. But Ridley describes the most amazing thing about Avado's transformation as being the fact that the same team stayed throughout all the change.
"It's not me being here that's made the change, I've been nothing more than a loud voice at the board-room table."
The change necessitated examining all development practises at the firm.
"It meant going all the way through the engineering stack. There were good practises across the platform, but there was a way to look at it more holistically that made it more efficient. So we looked at what we'd use for the CI [Continuous Integration] elements and CD [Continuous Deployment]. For configuration management [CM] we started using Azure. We realised we need more build servers, and for CM we identified GoCD which is an open source CD platform from ThoughtWorks. We use SaltStack for CM, that was where we started.
"We then did a quick tour of vendors, we looked at Puppet and Chef, we looked at cost of buying something compared with using an open source tool. But as an organisation we have quite a strong background in open source. We wanted to find something we could contribute back to. That's one of the core tenets of the way that we behave.
[Next page: Using the Microsoft stack]
CIO Interview: Mark Ridley, Group CTO, Blenheim Chalcot
Ridley explains how learning provider Avado transformed everything except its IT team and found success
Using the Microsoft stack
"So we started using Azure to host the CM servers, so we were actually configuring the servers hosted in our own data centre with the Salt servers that were in Azure. So we'd already started to move into this hybrid model. Then we pushed the UAT servers out to Azure too. So it was a slow shift, and even now though 90 per cent of our production servers are in our own data centre, we've now tested at a large scale with an elastic approach. So now it would be trivial to move everything to Azure."
Ridley has previously described O365 as the "gateway drug" to Azure.
The next step was to improve automated testing, working to include automated performance tests through the build processes. The team also looked at putting in Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) security testing in as part of the automated build process, in effect designing for security up front.
"And all of those things were done with the team that was already here, it was just a case of carving out the time for them to focus on things that they already knew how to do."
And the transformation didn't stop there. The organisations also moved from using Microsoft Exchange on-premises, to using Office 365 (O365).
"That set out story of starting to use Azure and O365, this Microsoft reference architecture, using it together and trying to understand how we could really sweat that. Lots of people didn't realise because they were using Outlook in the same way, but increasingly we started training people on how they could use the web client, how they could get access from different places.
"We then added Slack for teams, going through a bit of a shadow IT Slack rollout. There was lots of Slack use throughout the business, lots of Skype for Business, so we went through and made a concerted effort to all use Teams. That's actually had a really good improvement to internal communication."
Much like the BI and CRM implementations, this decision was again user-led.
"I wouldn't say people prefer Teams to Slack. I always want to be led by the users in everything we do. The Slack users were really big proponents of it. What we had to do was go out and say Teams might not quite have all the things that you love, there might be a few things that are missing, but we can make it do most of them, and at the same time you can integrate it directly with your calendar, with your files, with OneDrive and SharePoint.
"It's all about making these tools as easy as possible for people to use. Here it was compelling to use a lot of the Microsoft stack together. The last point of that has been using SharePoint as an intranet. Probably even in the middle of the year it wasn't quite where we wanted it. They've now got something called a Communication Site.
"They have these new themes to SharePoint, which is starting to put it in a position where I'm comfortable recommending that as an intranet we can use. For this office move a lot of our communication was on SharePoint, where previously it had been primarily email first."
Avado also implemented new HR and finance systems, and rolled out a new BYOD policy.
"There probably aren't many things which either haven't changed yet, or aren't earmarked to change. But the team is the big thing that hasn't changed. Lots of people look at teams and think somehow they're responsible for the state of the technology, and it's absolutely wrong. Certainly in my experience at Avado and elsewhere, the team often know the things that they've got to do, and if they can see the opportunity for improvements they're happy to reskill and retrain and learn."
He adds that the schedule for many of these transformations was demanding.
"When I look back there were things which we had to do because of projects which we had to add on to an already structured roadmap, and it took a lot of heroic effort from the team. There were a couple of projects which we either inherited from obligations to customers, or there was something like the office move, where we had a fixed deadline, and those things were really tough. You wouldn't have chosen to do projects of that size at the same time, but having done them I'm very pleased that we did.
"When you've got the trajectory Avado has, with really big aspirations and good growth to back that up, there isn't going to be a better time to make those big changes. It's only going to get more complicated the longer you leave it, with the more legacy you're building up. So even though it's painful now, it's still probably the best time to do it."
Ridley is 10th on Computing' s list of the Top 100 UK IT Leaders 2018.