TELUS digital—the in-house digital product agency for Canadian telecommunications company TELUS—serves 12 million Canadians with a team of ~325. As TELUS built its digital channel, it accumulated a portfolio of homegrown and off-the-shelf technologies. Eventually, this led to a breaking point, which paved the way for the next evolution of the company’s platform and delivery methods.
In an effort to deliver one-on-one marketing to customers, TELUS digital started from scratch, creating a new content platform: set of centralized tools and services that enables team members to easily add, update, and deliver content (marketing, product, and pricing), including personalization and analytics, across all their digital properties. A cornerstone of this platform is the content infrastructure, which replaced seven preexisting CMSs and content repositories.
Rouven Wessling & Andrew Kumar offer an overview of the platform and explains why TELUS digital chose a content infrastructure over traditional CMS options.
6. Andrew Kumar
Product & Practice Lead, Digital Platform
@kumar | andrew.kumar@telus.com
Rouven Wessling
Developer Evangelist
@RouvenWessling | rouven@contentful.com
7. Don’t let a CMS get in the way of
shipping software.
Contentful provides a content infrastructure that enables
teams to power content in any digital product.
9. Innovators are building digital factories
Reusable architectures that enable teams to quickly new products and expand into new channels
Global
Architecture
Account
Portal
eCommerce [new]
Web Mobile Web Voice [new]
CENTRAL HUB
A reusable, core architecture
for launching new products
TEAMS & BIZ UNITS
Cross-functional teams or
business units collaborate
PRODUCTS & CHANNELS
Engage with customers, experiment
with new technologies, promote the
successes into wider adoption
10. The leading content infrastructure for digital teams
Customers Partners Investors ($45M)
Team
160 Employees
San Francisco
Berlin
11. We’re 160 people from over
40 nations
We’re really bad at team
pictures
28. Growing Pains
CONSUMER
BUSINESS
MY
ACCOUNT
RUBY ON RAILS
ENGINE YARD AWS (PaaS) TELUS DIGITAL AWS
CMS (COMFY)
PHP ON
CODEIGNITER
(PRIME)
PHP ON CODEIGNITER (PRIME)
BTO
SERVICE
CMS
(LIGER)
BTO
SERVICE
TELUS DIGITAL AWS
BTO
SERVICE
JAVA
CMS HS
(LIGER)CMS (WMD)
TELUS DIGITAL AWS TELUS DIGITAL AWS
PHP ON CODEIGNITER (PRIME)
COMMERCE
(DRUPAL)
BTO
SERVICE
...
CMS
(WMD)
FROGGER | HYDRA |
JSP
FROGGER | TWIGGY
ANGULAR | REACT
BUSINESS CSS | HAML
FROGGER | TWIGGY | ANGULAR
RUBY ON SINATRA
TELUS DIGITAL AWS
VUE
BTO
SERVICE
...
TELUS DIGITAL AWS
NODEJS
CMS
(CONTENTFUL)
THORIUM | REACT
TELUS DIGITAL AWS
JAVA ON
SPRING BOOT
THORIUM | VUE
BTO
SERVICE
...
● Team grew quickly
● Moved quickly
● Operating model evolved
without strong architectural
oversight
● What made us successful to
date did not work at scale
29. Growing Pains
● Multiple CMSs
● Multiple overlapping CSS files
● No single source of code or design truth
● Teams reinvent the wheel
● Inconsistent customer experience
● Builds and updates take longer
Many teams were building TELUS experiences without an easy way to reuse work, share
ideas, or receive and consume design / code updates.
30. Content Operations = Incredible Effort
COMFY
LIGER
WMD
DRUPAL
GATHERCONTENT
ADOBE TARGET
STATIC JSON FILES
Mobility and Home Solutions Marketing, Products, Assets
Mobility Products, Plans, Pricing, Offers, Assets
Mobility and Home Solutions Products, Plans, Pricing
Consumer Support Articles
Business Marketing, Products, Plans, Pricing, Support, Assets
Home Solutions Bundling Rules
All Targeting and Personalization Marketing and Assets
Content Store Types of Content
It took incredible effort to maintain and sustain our digital properties.
We needed to simplify the way our team members manage our products day to day.
31. Land of Broken Toys
• Disjointed customer experience
• Very complicated technical
landscape
• Large effort required to create
and maintain content for our
products
Which led to …
• Unhappy Developers
• Unhappy Customers
• Unhappy Business
33. Why not a CMS?
“We are seeing too many organizations run
into troubles as they attempt to use their CMS
as a platform for delivering large and complex
digital applications.”
- ThoughtWorks Technology Radar
34. Today’s CMS
Page-centric model
SILOED CONTENT DISCONNECTED
Hard to change
Coupled to the CMS’ platform
Monolithic architecture
Templating
Editor
Database
38. Content Operations = Content Infrastructure
COMFY
LIGER
WMD
DRUPAL
GATHERCONTENT
ADOBE TARGET
STATIC JSON FILES
Mobility and Home Solutions Marketing, Products, Assets
Mobility Products, Plans, Pricing, Offers, Assets
Mobility and Home Solutions Products, Plans, Pricing
Consumer Support Articles
Business Marketing, Products, Plans, Pricing, Support, Assets
Home Solutions Bundling Rules
All Targeting and Personalization Marketing and Assets
Content Store Types of Content
Rationalizing our content stores improved operational efficiency, reusability
and brought consistency to the way our team members manage our products.
CONTENTFUL
39. Content Operations = Multi Region / Multi Language
13 Regions x 7 Languages (+ default fallbacks) = 98 locales.
40. Content Infrastructure: Spaces
Products &
Services
Legal Info
Nav, Footer,
Elements
CommsGlobal
Line of
Business
App Deals Accessories
Mobility Home Health Business
Leveraging different tiers of spacing to
intelligently structure content for
reference and reuse.
● Common shared data in global
spaces
● Common shared data within line
of business dedicated spaces
● Common shared data within
customer first functional
applications
41. Content Infrastructure: Modelling
Page Design
Visual
Component
Specs
Site Map User Flows
Design
Visual Design
User Experience
Information Arch.
Content
Template
Specs
Content
Component
Specs
Content
Tree
Content
Editor Flows
Content
Architecture
Content Modelling
Editor Experience
Workflow
Targeting / SEO / Analytics / Localisation / Regionalization
Editor Roles / Responsibilities
HTML Component
Content
Tree Mgmt
Workflow
Config
Development
Application Arch.
Functional
Non-Functional
Integration
Quality
Operations
Content Modelling
● create models for content
● determine how to reuse content
● define how and which team
members create, edit, and publish
● make it easy to find content
● support change management:
training, documentation, etc.
42. Content Infrastructure: Product Content
Products &
Services
Legal Info
Nav, Footer,
Elements
Global Line of Business App
Deals AccessoriesMobility
46. Content Infrastructure: Marketing Applications
Audience / Brands
TELUS, Koodo, Public Mobile
Web, Mobile, Store
Customer & Team Member channels
Digital Tools
Digital Intelligence
Analytics
Collect web usage data
Site Builder Engine
Standards compliant web pages, with
optimized SEO & Performance, easily created
and updated using the Content Management
System
Site Builder
Digital Experience
Marketing Pages
Accelerate
Data
Optimize
Build With
TELUS Design System
NodeJS Framework
Standards
Home Page(s)
Segmentation
Identify Customer Segments
Personalization
Optimize Messaging / Actions
Interactions
Content Management
Content Storage
47. Content Infrastructure: Application Architecture
Consumer
(Mobile & Home)
Corporate
(About, Annual
Report, DRB)
Business Quebec
Content
Platform
Different data sources
(spaces) with identical
content models
Site Builder
One application to
support marketing
pages and campaign
pages
Deploy
Render through a
view, automate tests,
and deploy to delivery Delivery Platform
TELUS Design System
Health
Consumer
Health
Business
TELUS
International
Koodo Public
Public DSKoodo DS
Automated Testing Platform
Site Builder Engine:
Data Structures, Multilingual, SEO, Regional Specification, Search, Routing, Accessibility, Performance
1:1 Marketing Integrations:
Analytics, Data Layer, Personalization (Audience Manager), Testing (Target), AI (Sensei)
48. Content Infrastructure: Support Architecture
Audience / Brands
TELUS, Koodo, Public Mobile
Web, Mobile, Store, Bots, IVR, ...
Customer & Team Member channels
Digital Tools
Digital Intelligence
Analytics
Collect data
Knowledge Base Engine
Support content IA Platform that centralizes
and standardized access to support
knowledge, facilitating the creation of any
support type experiences.
Knowledge Base
Digital Experiences
Support Content for Sales
Accelerate
Data
Optimize
Build With
TELUS Design System
NodeJS Framework
Standards
Support Articles for Agents
Interactions
Support Articles on Website
Content Management
Build With
Personalization
Optimize Messaging / Actions
Content Storage
49. Content Infrastructure: Products, Programs, Practice
Products
Contentful
Platform
Site Builder Message Builder
Redux-Contentful UI Extensions
GraphiQL Article Engine
CLI Migrate & Transform
Programs
Enterprise Comms (ECP) Multicultural TELUS
Legacy CMS Retirement Spaces Consolidation
DRB Revamp TELUS Quebec & Health
Marketing Cloud Integration AI Integration
Practice
Office Hours
Contentful 101 Monthly
Workshops, Guilds
Meeting Mondays
User Success
Support & Tracking Contentful SME Onsite Visits
Account Provisioning Training & Developer Portal
Communications Audits & Quarterly Reviews
Certification Program Collaboration Tools
User Services
Consulting / Advisory Integration Dev Pairing
Data Modelling Critique / Review
Onboarding Quality Assurance
Custom Training Q&A
Lunch & Learns
Meetups & Events
Contentful Community
Blogs, Lessons Learned
Thought Leadership
Visionary Performance Oriented Enablement
50. Content Infrastructure: Products, Programs, Practice
Products
Contentful
Platform
Site Builder Message Builder
Redux-Contentful UI Extensions
GraphiQL Article Engine
CLI Migrate & Transform
Programs
Enterprise Comms Multicultural TELUS
Legacy CMS Retirement Spaces Consolidation
DRB Revamp TELUS Quebec & Health
Marketing Cloud Integration AI Integration
Practice
Office Hours
Contentful 101 Monthly
Workshops, Guilds
Meeting Mondays Gov
User Success
Support & Tracking Contentful SME Onsite Visits
Account Provisioning Training & Developer Portal
Communications Audits & Quarterly Reviews
Certification Program Collaboration Tools
User Services
Consulting / Advisory Integration Dev Pairing
Data Modelling Critique / Review
Onboarding Quality Assurance
Custom Training Q&A
Lunch & Learns
Meetups & Events
Contentful Community
Blogs, Lessons Learned
Thought Leadership
Visionary Performance Oriented Enablement
Platform satisfies fundamentals: Data Models, Data Storage, Asset Storage, CDN
Products enable quick win customer
experiences, data retrieval,
referencing content between spaces,
moving and transforming data across
spaces.
Programs enable Tech Debt
retirement, increased business
capabilities, increase speed to
market, and present the right content
at the right time for our customers.
User Success enable better
adoption, utilization, and quality of
our Products & Programs.
User Services enable scale,
influence, and incredible tailored
implementation value for partners
such as Quebec, Health, Koodo,
Public, One Source, etc...
Practice
Leadership
raises the bar of
our collective
teams at TELUS
and establishes
TELUS as a
community
leader in tactical
digital
innovation.
Initiatives that solve future
challenges today
Initiatives that improve efficiency
and effectiveness
Initiatives that enable our teams
to succeed
54. 4 APIs are at the foundation of Contentful
Content
Management API
Images API
Content
Delivery API
Content
Preview API
55. Flexible enough to handle any kind of digital product
Think outside the CMS box
On-ship digital experiences:
kiosks, displays, menus, etc.
Multivariate testing
Learning academy
Microsites
Audio guides
Interactive displays
Immersive website
Super Bowl campaign
Employee training app
Chatbot with product
recommendations
56. Content Model as Code
module.exports = function (migration) {
const page = migration.createContentType('page')
.name('Page')
.description('A page on our site')
.displayField('title');
page.createField('title')
.name('Title')
.type('Symbol');
page.createField('slug')
.name('Slug')
.type('Symbol')
.required(true);
}
67. ~112,000
Object oriented content: content objects
created, revised, and published to customers in
Q4 of 2017
Content Infrastructure: Prod Content Object Publish, Edit, Revised
68. Average software releases per day per
product (up to 400 code deploys daily)
20+
Content Infrastructure: Average Software Releases
74. Increased conversion by using
consistent content & personalization
14%
Content Infrastructure: Increased Conversion
75. Turning off Legacy CMS in favour of flexible Content
Infrastructure took costs out of the business.
1
2
3
Content Infrastructure reduced Content Operations
efforts and took costs out of the business.
Object Oriented Content and reuse of content in
support self-service took costs out of the business.Continuous Learning
Content Infrastructure: Just getting started.
4 Personalized and anticipatory experiences increase
conversion and revenue for TELUS.
76. Andrew Kumar
Product & Practice Lead,
Digital Platform
@kumar | andrew.kumar@telus.com
Rouven Wessling
Developer Evangelist
@RouvenWessling |
rouven@contentful.com