IT Strategy for a Sports Goods Retailer

Client

The customer, a large sports goods manufacturer, had employed a vendor to support web initiatives at the very end of their development cycle. This resulted in tactical solutions with very short-term benefits. The customer wanted to explore ways of reducing time, cost and non-compliance of the digital marketing projects executed under the vendor.

LTM was chosen as a partner to help redefine the company’s IT strategy for its digital marketing. We explored options for pre-investing in strategic building blocks that reduce boot-up time of digital marketing projects, improve governance, ease the maintenance handover and also address needs that fall into no man’s land. 

Challenge

• Remediate shortfall: Reduce security, operational and compliance exposures by correcting issues in the existing architecture. 
• Preempt non-compliance: Slow down or prevent proliferation of non-compliant solutions. 
• Align with business: Proactively invest in solutions that support upcoming brand marketing needs, achieve operational excellence and improve governance and quality.

Our Approach

Our immediate focus was to stabilize the existing brand marketing platform and create a foundation for future builds. LTM identified key areas of high impact, such as streamlining content management, custom campaign support and performance tuning.

Other areas that needed improvement were compliance in the technology adoption process, user experience, data migration, outsourced solutions and infrastructure migration.

LTM focused on aligning business objectives with the setting up of systems and processes in time for the business to achieve its goals. 

The following recommendations were made to enhance / remediate the functional metrics: 

• Content management: Switch the content authoring process from developer / support operated mode to a business operated mode; automate content translation process.
• Content delivery: Optimize codebase, caching strategy.
• Search: Provide site-wide searchability and implement image search optimization.
• Organic SEO: Embed SEO keywords in pages, drive SEO optimization though CMS, and explore other SEM strategies.
• Web analytics: Extend tagging capabilities to capture user behavior, and track user behavior across multiple web properties.
• Competitions: Resolve performance issues around UGC submissions and streamline the content upload and transcoding process.
• Social media: Track user behavior based on social ID; use social profile information to drive segmentation and personalization.
• Product catalog: Build adapter to automatically process catalog updates in PID and DW; fix non-availability of product information for multiple products across markets.

The following recommendations were made to enhance / remediate the non-functional metrics:

• Performance: Optimize application performance by code tuning, optimizing interaction between layers, and optimizing data caching.
• Maintainability: Index sufficient log information into Splunk for efficient debugging; automate build process and integrate with code quality analysis tools; and explore the possibility of integrating the automated regression test suite.
• Availability: Provision external site monitoring capabilities and integrate broken link detection tool.
• Scalability: Extend current platform to include capabilities like site manager, reusable template / widget library to quickly provision new site.
• Usability: Enhance user experience by incorporating SSO and WCAG.

LTM Solution

LTM proposed the following initiatives to improve the IT strategy of the organization:

• Brand Marketing Platform (BMP).This enhancement to the existing platform helps prepare for future web initiatives. It:
  • Reduces the time taken to launch a site from inception by 25-30% from a typical 20-25 weeks cycle.
  • Reduces the overall effort required to launch a site by at least 20%.
  • Improves the compliance score on 22 points for every site launched.
  • Builds a reusable widget library that can strive for 60% reuse whenever new properties are launched.
  • Is a roadmap for enhancements.

• Consumer Mobile Platform (CMP). This mobile web development, validation and hosting service for consumers offers:
  • Close to 100% mobile enablement of existing web properties by a shared platform.
  • Early involvement in web property development to accelerate rollout on a channel that is growing at a rate higher than 10% every year. Social, commercial and experience expected of a market leader, on mobile devices.
  • Improved mobile penetration with existing consumers.

• Consumer engagement and loyalty platform. This elevates the online consumer engagement by utilizing behavior data and integration with loyalty programs. It offers:
  • Close to 100% compliance to CCD guidelines. 
  • Enhanced consumer experience and increased cross-site reference with a single sign on. 
  • Centralized consumer intelligence across multiple channels into CRM to drive segmentation. 
  • Personalization based on segmentation. 
  • Increased user engagement with more competitions and challenges using an integrated loyalty management solution.

Business Benefits 

• Better visibility of IT initiatives with clear service levels, exit criteria and expected completion times.
• Opportunity to fine tune steps by capturing process metrics.
• Improved planning and resource management by advanced notification.
• Automated processes to improve documentation and records management