before we we get into the some of the meat of the subject I wanted to give you a little bit of background about myself to start off with with the company that I work for say it's blue as well as the consulting engagement that I had with the abus budget group in a meeow meeow meeow region so my role is director one of directors of is ace blue co-founder and also principal consultant and I deal directly with with the clients those blue tends to work mostly with global corporates with multinationals as well as with startups private equity firms as well as injured capital firms and primarily offering you know strategic consulting services as well as advisory work with Avis budget when they engaged me back in 2012 it was initially to help them formulate their digital and e-commerce strategy within the MENA region and the subsequent engagements with Avis budget have actually involved the you know the execution of that strategies and that involves things like you know the planning side the implementation and enroll out and that's that's the land away at the moment key focus for Zayas blue you know very much in the technology enabled business change you know digital transformation for wonderful better term and you know agile product development together with an innovation culture and management and my previous roles have been mostly group CIO CTO those sorts of roles and also been a founder of a couple of technology startups as well so I thought I wanted to share a story with you to begin with and given this is a very nice theater I thought a movie theme was quite appropriate and it's a it's a personal story a true story a story of ups and downs of celebration and a little bit of fear and trepidation anticipation hope and ultimately some some triumph as well - so let me set the scene for you 2011 my family and I travelled to Australia we live in London but we travelled to Australia to see our extended families and friends and it was Christmas Day in my hometown in Melbourne so Christmas celebration everyone was having a great time the barbecue was fired up kids were enjoying themselves you know a perfect Christmas day setting or so it seemed later in the afternoon the weather started the turn for the worse and by about three o'clock the storms really started to come in and we start to get quite worried and then come 3:30 this hailstorm hit like I've never ever experienced before in my life it was unbelievable it you know it sounded like someone was pummeling the roof of the house with hammers you know the kids were all scared your head also was scared as well and we could tell at one point there's some of the tiles and on the house were actually starting to break this is that bad just I was and my my foot started to turn to the rental car I had from budget I'd rented a budget car from Melbourne Airport I looked outside in the footwell I wonderful was happening out there and I thought maybe I should step outside then I was like no it's too dangerous far too dangerous to go out there I couldn't have done anything anyway because my my father-in-law's garage is really full of cars so we waited until it was all over and we walked outside and it was just a complete nutter sea of white I'm sure you've the mushy call golf-ball-sized hail stones well these were close to tennis ball size seriously and I went to the rental car and it was not a pretty picture at all the the bonnet the roof the trunk dented the windscreen was smashed and to add an insult to injury the hailstones given are so big were bouncing off the driveway definitely also pole the side panels of the car sir essentially it was a write-off and we looked around the street and it was a disaster the state emergency services that had been called out we would learnt that the house 30 metres down the road 70 or 80 tiles were broken it took them at best part of two or three weeks to sort out the situation but anyway going back to Christmas Day I might again I'm thinking what do I do now I need to get in touch with budget and to let them know about what's happened to the car and and find out about next steps what what do I do so I go in touch with them they asked me where I was in the meantime and the news we're hearing that surrounding roads were getting blocked off flooded out say it was it was a it was a real state disaster lo and behold they replaced my car arrived in one hour amazing I thought myself Wow one hour and the gentleman came in the tow truck he had the replacement car there dropped it off picked up the the damaged car and I said to him what else do we need to do a paperwork this and they said not that's it he goes it's all done don't get all sorted and I'm still dumbfounded like but by how well is this all worked and he was about to drive away and he said oh by the way there's another hail storm front coming through a Gaza shoot here pretty soon as well so what do I do now you know is it gonna be deja vu and I quickly asked him associate because it shouldn't be as bad and he was actually right it wasn't as bad and you know that the the new car was fine so there you know that was good news second piece of good news was that when I actually returned the car you know the excess was $300 Australian so that was that was a good piece of news for me so effectively you know you know what had been an absolute disaster situation for us at least you know the car the car at least was was was okay and you know the reason why I've paid only 300 is because I paid I paid the full access the the access reduction fee when I rented the car so at the end of the day you know I was a I was a happy chappy a happy customer and I came to thinking to myself you know how did how was budget able to do this how are they able to to deliver this sort of level of service and deliver it in the timeframe that they did so I thought about some one of the wall you know I I had emails from them I pronounced the websites they were contact numbers hours of operation content it was all up to date it was correct what going back to content here and then I thought about why why did I go and pay the full you know insurance amount why did I do that well I remember I actually went to the budget site and I looked at the options and I could see what was included not included and I chose the option that I thought made sense to me based on information that was provided to me and I remember when I actually returned that we're leaving Melbourne I returned the car and I went to the rental station and I asked the lady and she said to me she goes there were other people who had rental cars from budget during that Christmas day there's quite a number of she says who they took out they took out insurance but they took the basic level and their excess was just under three thousand dollars Australian so again you know that that certainly proved to me that you know when we talk about content and the importance of content it's it's got a service and the good times and in the bad times and frankly most companies and brands are measured when the chips are down when things are not going well you know how well do they respond how flexible are they have flexible either their processes clearly with with budget you know important information correct I was able to somehow trigger operational processes that they had in place for be able to enable this guy to arrive you know with the truck with roads blocked off and so forth within and out with a replacement car so you know great levels of service and content obviously played an important role both visible content and non visible content to me at the time so a little bit of a brief a brief history for you some some background on Davis Budget Group at a global sense over the last few years 2011 the Ava's Budget Group in the u.s. acquired Avis Europe so after well over 20 years Ava's budget became again a global entity a global corporation and in 2012 Avis Budget Group certainly looked looked at its acquisition there and could obviously see some real opportunities here number one to integrate a versus European to the global firm but there were definitely some serious opportunities here to reduce cost promote some efficiencies so that that included looking at the the model of Avis budget which was federated so you you had a you had a head office a notional head office in the UK but each of the markets operated like you know like a separate entity almost so you had an IT in the marketing department in France in Germany same in the UK so great opportunity here to rationalize and streamline by this stage certainly a fair bit of thinking and work had been done around key areas that there could be simplified rationalized improved and one of those key areas was digital and digital commerce in particular Avis budget saw an opportunity here to take the existing digital real estate in Avis budget amount which was quite substantial big footprint websites mobile web mobile apps mobile apps across multiple different device types I asked Android Blackberry Windows but then were particularly happy with how any of that really worked there more particularly happy that it that it truly represented what Avis budget were were about so some important things that happened in 2013 they acquired Zipcar so much I'm sure some of you're aware of Zipcar which is the shared card network they also come you know acquired a company called paleis primarily operates in north america and they they offer you know good value cheaper cheaper current or so it really gave a vers budget the opportunity to you know bolster up the brain stable the Avis and budget brands were visited and revitalizes brands so they they looked at the the brands themselves what they stood for how they behaved in in in in the in the public's eyes and made some changes and adjustments cleared up the values and principles and so forth and you know wanted to make sure number one that it was clear within your organization's themselves you know who is Avis who is budget what do we stand for what do we do what do we consider acceptable behavior and ensure that there was clear delineation across across the brands and this this was you know the beginning of a new digital torn so as part of the work I certainly did with the team there there was a big focus on really bolstering up both within IT and within the commercial team that incorporated my opinion there's the bolster up those teams and putting some expertise in place brought in from other verticals not necessarily carpet legal so there were people who came in from retail from from FMCG space we're really bringing in some fresh thinking fresh ideas but also just experience in that whole digital space that could could be applied an analogous way within the car rental industry so 2013 some cool elements of the the new digital platform put in place and budget brand were the first brand to be rolled out so that was the last half of the year last year so budget went on to the new platform off eleven year old technology and as we speak right now Avis is part way through the process of rolling onto that platform and I'll show you some some screenshots later Nueva site was launched last week now with for many years we've been talking about content and you know if we went back to desktop publishing and from desktop publishing we have two web publishing and proliferation of content management system and open source commercial together with you know CMS providers a lot of you know consolidation assimilation and you know the mantras always been content is king and I think it's true to say that content still is king and in this day and age where we have an increasing set of channels device types and you know customers who have the ability now to to voice their opinions their concerns their interests more vocally through social networks content has become increasingly important both increasingly more sophisticated and more fragmented in some ways so very important and something that we you know that needs to be treated as as a core as a core element of any business strategy so when it came to the digital program the Faber's budget group for a mirror and looking at all the different elements when it came to the actual CMS itself you know we were faced with quite a number of options there and we looked at you know it was it was a three pass evaluation phrase effectively and initially the first it was about 20 odd and that was you know it's probably bit half of that was commercial offerings about another the other so 40% were some open source products and also the evaluation also included some CMS - link that was already in place within the group globally and we whittled that down to a top things about top five and we went to the top top two and we went through a you know a careful evaluation exercise with it I think whoa go - whoa from end to end it was roughly about it was roughly about two months into end and clearly Magnolia was was the choice or I wouldn't be presenting here today but there were two core aspects of Magnolia that were particularly attractive to the Avis Budget Group and you know you've got your core content management capability but also this this notion of acting as a Content platform and by content platform I mean the ability to provide content services that are not application specific services that can service multiple channels touch points multiple devices but also used API based capabilities as well but do it in a very application independent way as well so that was something was very very attractive some of the key things that stood out for over budget Magnolia well firstly its ease of use a very strong architecture that mapped really well to the architectural principles that Davis budget worked with and some of that included you know that strong separation between you know your content and the actual presentation itself the very modular approach the ability to scale up cost-effectively including the ability to very easily create new pages create new templates and effectively just create new content without needing to involve the IT team in most of the releases that was something that they'd been dealing with for quite a while so effectively we went from a lot of cases from timelines where certain changes would take three months time down to you know weeks and days or hours in some situations so it's quite quite a difference night day difference the other the other key thing was obviously moving from multiple bespoke CMS solutions that a person budget had in place that have been growing over a number of years to one single platform shared platform some shared components across the brains so attraction there of getting some standardization at group level standardization at brain level but still having that ability to to customize and to adapt based on a brand by brand basis and also on a country-by-country basis and to be able to support but you know very specific needs within those markets whether it's you know specific needs at the french market at around marketing all the German market Italian or Spanish well UK now so if we if we look at the actual program that we went through I mean there's a load of areas that we could focus on here but I chose to just focus on a couple and one that ice was fundamental to success was content migration so you know the slide there says look before you cross key key lesson I think that many of us within the team there had learned in past lives you know working other other organizations was that you do need to treat content migration as the first class if that's a project in itself and it should be well integrated into your overall CMS program if you're a very small firm obviously you know there's gonna be some of these things you don't need to worry about but I think even if you don't have an existing CMS that you need to migrate content from you're probably still gonna have content somewhere so you need to get that content from where it is to where it needs to be and as part of that process you're probably going to need to transform it from one form to another or you may need to extract a subset of that of that content other other thoughts other things that we need deal with was the brains change so we needed to change the tone of voice of some of the content so for instance you may find that you need to take content that's quite you know fun in tone and you need to change it to more authoritative take authoritative content that's very Florida you need to change it to something that's a bit warmer and friendlier either way that's you know this will work that needs to happen and it needs to be fought through planned out key learning for for us as well as part of migration is that you do not make any assumptions about the quality of that data just because someone says that will be fine it'll be okay you need to check you need to check and that analysis that you do especially if you've got volumes and volumes of pages and in that cases you know thousands and thousands of pages yeah you clearly want to automate as much as much as possible but it needs to be a happy blend of automated analysis together with manual actually getting real eyeballs looking at that content to see is there appropriate is it on brand is it legally compliant and you know don't be surprised that you'll find you've got pockets of content that's a bit questionable on a number of those fronts so it does need to be treated as a serious process there are certainly approaches out there and tools and techniques that can really help you in this process and it was really important for us to look hard at this because we were set some pretty tough challenges by the commercial tenants as a woman isn't it a bit delivered by so we we use some very cool technology and combine techniques with some outside expertise to help us specifically around that process and it meant number one we've got there much more quickly but secondly we we did it with a lot less resources as well we didn't need to have an army of people working on content migration checking and so forth both centrally in the UK and also across the European markets we could do it much more effectively whose tooling approaches we had agreed that could highlight that smaller percentage of content that needed to be deep dive on someone into deep deep dive onto so content migration certainly a key consideration and a plan you need a plan I'm I still I never cease to be surprised by examples are here of organisations companies small and big well-established and you know newer plays as well who go into a you know a CMS implementation whether the you know they're fresh off the block around content management or they've got something there and they need to get that yeah you know they've got some legacy things to deal with as part of implementation they they walk into it there's just a high level plan dive into it get it out there and let's just get people to use it and my recommendation certainly especially a scenario where you've got a multinational where you do have existing businesses serious businesses that that also retail this to you've you know you've got a machine that needs to run and you're going to shift them whilst in flight onto another one that the whole thing needs to be thought through and planned out it's a program of work and it's synchronized activities that need to that need to work really really well and so testing is absolutely fundamental so if you've got a plan then you've got elements of that plan that you don't have experience with not given the same you know if it's a different set of staff different technology different processes you need to test that out somehow find a way to test it to ensure that the plan number one is sufficiently detailed is robust enough and has been somehow tested and thought through and so seek the opinion of multiple people across the organization especially people have been responsible for content in content management not just you your head office but you if you've got you know remote locations or international locations you need to engage those people to ensure that what you do have them in place is you know it's going to work and it's going to get you to the to the moon and back so post the implementation some key things that certainly certainly in my mind from an access and a workflow perspective you know these were two key areas for both a Burson budget they've had a lot of experience in you know in in in using and maybe under utilizing tools over the years with the bespoke solutions that were in place and I'll tell you right now we did the numbers and they were I think it was the number was something close to a couple hundred people here who'd had the ability to edit content on the old CMS system so they did want to get a lot tighter controlled on who had access and what could they do and also more fine-grained as well and magnolias certainly gave him that workflow was critical there was workflow embedded into the in the old solution but a fair bit of it was actually just understood the the tool didn't support them in also didn't stop them from doing certain things they could create messy situations so with Magnolia in particular there there was a big focus on the workflow itself but but customizing that workflow to number one give the business the control and visibility it needed but also to ensure for instance that the audit ability was there now Avis budget amia was owned again by a u.s. entity we needed to ensure that auditing was appropriate we need to know who made what change wing and the ability to easily back changes out we needed to be sarbanes-oxley compliant and Magnolia certainly was able to step up to the challenge there another another aspect of the work flow was ensuring that all the right stakeholders were involved given the amount of work that was done on really tidying up the brains and making sure that the brands were crisply defined and that the the the brands were represented appropriately in all touch points and all viewpoints it was important to get the branding team the main marketing team involved in content content review so the process itself allows even the branding team they get notified about changes so they can choose to go in and review content and provide comments if for instance some of those changes proposed changes that have been made are clearly going to have potential brand implications then they the ability to actually flick it so it becomes a mandatory step for the branding people to to review so certainly digital marketing team waters review the content but you know on a case-by-case basis the process can't support that ability for them to formally go and provide the comments and it ain't going to go past that step until they say yea or nay a few weeks back I took I took my family to Peppa Pig world so I'm not sure how many of you aware of who knows about Peppa Pig here anyone a couple of people maybe yeah so Peppa Pig very very very very popular in in the UK and I know in my homeland in Australia as well so it's a it's a kids TV program you know young kids young kids love it and they've got a Peppa Pig whale which is an area called New Forest which is just sort of its re north of Southampton and it's part of a massive amusement park called palton spot but this this whole pig well you can stay there all day that's what we did it was fantastic great for the kids really safe really well organised they the big characters and the kids could hug them and all that stuff right and I came across the sign here and I thought well that's that's that's quite clear I started reading through and I even read the last line there which says you know anyone found crossing or touching the exhibit will be a victim from the park I mean that's pretty harsh isn't it it's really harsh and I thought wow that's that's a bit tough I've thought about a little more well you know what this is actually this is actually quite good this is good I mean I've got very simple unambiguous and clear directions here and I you know I can relate I can relate to that to what we're doing with a Avis Budget Group and and and the responsible people within the commercial department who have set up you know I've done the training who've set up the the manuals and the guidelines as well and you know it's important to to draw that perimeter and to tell people you know what is acceptable and what is not acceptable and you know if something is on brand if something is clearly off-brand and especially when spending so much time and effort on ensuring that the brand is represented consistently and well then you know someone should get rapped on the knuckles if put something out there completely inappropriate or if something's you know legally speaking is not compliant and around terms and conditions and so forth so it is important very important to put in simple clear instructions and guidelines and rules as well and don't just leave it don't just leave it to people and say well this is all common sense we know health and common sense is so uncommon so best to be explicit and best to be very black and white and you know the larger the organization or the complexity of whatever the company's doing whether it's steer the offerings they provide the range of offerings or the number of sites that are involved I think the number people involved in that content management content publishing process you do need to ensure that that that you know what is considered the right way to do things and best practices are communicated out there and communicated very clearly and that if if if someone does pick up on issues and problems that does get communicated out and someone is provided with feedback that also told you know what is the right thing what the wrong thing to do and clearly if you pick up that there is a problem with those guidelines then they should be fixed so that brings me through the next the next point with the NGO life as I mentioned to you budget went live last year on the new platform but you know we're continually you know like hawks observing learning and adjusting it's not enough to say that you know we've done we've done the hard yards with with what the processes in place was put the champions in place the stakeholders the review process and it'll just work well you know it's not as simple as that and then a large operation like Avis Budget Group you know things do change and you know the marketplace changes the the business needs the market needs change and you you need to ensure that you know you as people are responsible but also those stakeholders and champions out there are keenly watching ensuring that you know continuous improvement is a fire mine and always looking to to do things better to look at improving you know you've got a great tool set in Magnolia that number one provides a good capability out of the box but you know that ability to say hey there's something would love to be able to do we can't do it well can we just build a reusable component okay look at the the the libraries and say what's in there and one of the challenges for us I think was that in some cases that they didn't actually go check and see what was in the library stuff and thankfully yeah someone would pick up on and say hey what you're just about to implement this thing do you know this component actually already does it you know we had that experience with a couple of the a couple of the key components and thankfully that saved us the time of effort having to reinvent the wheel so rather than talk about the you know experience and so forth I thought it'd be great to just share you with you some of the results Avis went live with the new in UK with love with the new website last Thursday and I've got some screenshots here and I think you know actually I should should have included screenshots of the old website it looks really different and you know this is definitely on brand its Avis it's the premier brand out of the whole group so you know it really placed the sort of demographic that Avis targets and a lot of that is around the discerning renter person who knows the sort of vehicle that they want they like there's options in there too to actually select the specific vehicles as well but it is very much the the premier brand and so the styling the tone of voice the images the images are you know they're beautiful it's beautiful imagery its high resolution certainly creates challenges around things like bandwidth and so forth so we need to be clever with the technical aspects of you know how we deliver that content out to the that end user and can we use coalification and content distribution networks and so forth but you know at the end of the day you know the experiences the feedback we've had so far is that it's good there's a lot of interactivity as well so I encourage you going check and and try it out but we we've tried to each step of the way to try and reduce the amount of effort that someone needs to put into the book the car so whether it's you know searching for the location the map coming up automatically and if it finds that destination really quickly the map automatically moves moves to the spot but it encourage you to look at it in your own time so that's the desktop I've got some further screenshots here further down the the actual workflow itself so on the left side is just the normal book booking flow there was actually brought up the search results the vehicles and you know you can you can click on the on the continue button you can click on the other side there you can see you know very clear calls for action the attributes of the vehicles really stand out they pop out they're very obvious on the right side this is actually looking in one of the sections where you as I said we're looking at the selects you as a vehicle so high-end cars BMW Mercedes and so forth moving to tablet and find this is what this is screenshots off of my iPad actually so both in portrait and landscape so there's a combination of both responsive and adaptive design so adaptive designers has been primarily used in the actual booking path itself the workflow where we actually want to have extra control on the on the customer experience use the more of an adaptive approach there and then responsive on the other parts but it renders nicely and that's that's on on a mobile mobile so this is mobile fröbel web again renders nicely the relevant content is shown up there and capabilities that that play to the strengths of the mobile device so just to give you a sense of the difference between the brands Avis the premier brand budget is more the fun brand now it's it's shifted its focus more from the value brand to the to the to the fine brained and I think you can you can actually see that in the color scheme choice the imagery that's used in undertoned voices well Overson budget in europe historically never advertised in print traditional media so whether it's magazines newspapers or advertising on TV so for the first time this year they've started some advertising so any of you who are from the UK you may have noticed a wrap arounds on the time at magazine for budget ads full-page ads in newspapers and on Tuesday night I think it was during the the walk up match at halftime the the first ever Avis ad in the side of the world was was was played so um I've actually got it here and I will play it for you it's one minute but I think it sort of gets gets the point across about how Avis certainly sees itself and how it wants to portray itself and in the public's eye so one last piece of advice I think you know I know it's a bit of a pun but you know putting a CMS in the new CMS into place for a large operation like Avis budget is a journey and it's really important that it's really important that you know I would say an infectious positive attitude is is critical to ensure that the you know that the the project runs as smoothly as possible you are going to have the ups and downs there'll be a little bit of confusion here and there because you got so many moving pieces but you need the positive attitude to ensure that things do keep ticking along and and that these things are usually blips and it's important to celebrate important to celebrate the little wings along the way and the bigger wins as well too so that's off the wall now yeah you know kitchen at home right so I see that every single day that's my that's my email just if anyone wants to drop me a line please feel free to do so so what I'd like to do now is it's it's one minute the new Avis TV ad some of you may have seen it during the match with toughness for paper constraints you can have your own set of wings with your feet on the ground you're a bird in flight fists holding tightly to the string of your kite let's go fly a kite up to the highest height let's go flying a kite who can say miss fear up where the air is clear Oh and you'll notice with the website and any of the digital properties and little that the themes flow on the color the colors the imagery the tone of voice is common that's certainly one of the challenges certainly the sort of environment we want to ensure that the digital and the real are aligned and work well together so thank you for your time