What's the problem you're trying to solve?
We have 24,000 websites and 56,000 domain names. It’s not sustainable, we need to downsize. We’re thinking one website to rule them all. Is it possible, if so, how?
It did feel a little like a journey through middle earth to solve this. However, I didn’t encounter Gollum or face a battle at Helms Deep. Nor was the answer one site to rule them all.
Going on an adventure
Like a Hobbit (although a bit taller and with slightly less hairy toes), to solve this, I went on an adventure to understand global education systems and the land of Pearson.
To solve a problem like this, you need to find a common point that would allow you to create a single website. Education, for the record, isn’t enough. For one site to exist every education system in the world would need to be identical in the following ways👇🏻
- Age that students start education
- Age and stages
- Naming of stages
- Qualifications
The eagle eyed amongst you would probably just jump on the last point as being the problem, but you could still make it work with that failure alone.
Spoiler alert, there aren’t any commonalities globally that match identically. The largest problem being the ages and stages that students move through education.
So, couldn’t have one website then. OK. So what could we do?
That meant travelling through the land of Pearson, which wasn’t just a bustling metropolis. There were dark dusty caverns to peer in, small shops that looked derelict and vast mountain ranges of information.
I didn’t just trust the numbers, I needed to see with my own eyes what these websites did. What they looked like. Who they served. How important they were.
At the end of my three week adventure, I was able to give them a destination with a detailed map of how to get there.
Two websites, per market. One for each major vertical that the company serviced. Education and Clinical.
The Map (a spreadsheet) showed what the largest market structure would look like and what websites would be folded into it, and when.
It was reverse scaled. Which meant I’d planned for the worse case scenario in scale, and then worked out how it could shrink to fit markets that had a lot less.
The beauty of this piece of work was that it was still valid, and still being worked on five years after I designed it.
I like to think of the structures I’ve designed like trousers you wear to Christmas lunch, aka stretchy with lots of elastic. Giving a business room to move without fully constraining them builds longevity into what they want to do.
What I loved about this
I loved this bit of work so much, for reasons you might not expect.
- I was two steps down from the board, so they were bought in to what I was recommending.
- The majority of the business was fully bought into the transformation needed - fewer websites and domain names didn’t mean fewer employees.
- The cost savings would show a big bump at the start and then long tail out over time.
- I was asked to go do what I do best and not come back until I’d done it. By that I mean go become a subject matter expert with the curiosity of a beginner. I could go places a permanent employee couldn’t go and ask things they would get in hot water for asking.
Random fact
Did you know Pearson didn't start out as a textbook or education company? They started out as a civil engineering company, becoming one of the largest in the world at the start of the 20th Century. They were responsible for the construction of the Blackwall Tunnel in London and the admiralty harbour in Dover. They then went on to buy Royal Doulton, become an electricity company, a private bank and an oil company. They also owned a majority stake in Penguin publishing.
If you're wondering if companies can change (you're thinking evil oil and gas corps), the answer is yes. Pearson was all of those in a single century. Now they provide the books and technology to teach your children.