This is an excerpt from my interview with Jora Gill from the forthcoming Chief Digital Officer's Handbook. Jora is the new Chief Digital Officer of the Economist. The interview will appear in full with other digital though leaders in the forthcoming handbook.
Mark
Baker: Okay, so the first question is basically a background one. Tell me
about your organisation, yourself and how you got to where you are.
Jora
Gill: Okay. So we're The Economist, a publisher of a weekly print digital
edition as well as an app and at online, economist.com. We talk on a variety of
subjects and we really are there to bring...I would say the news behind the
news to really have folks who read up content and to think about what's
happening around the globe right now. Be it finance, be it business, be it
news, be it technology we want to evoke
a reaction with the news behind the news we'd really like to do is build a community,
we have built a community on the one side terrific journalist, write
world-class stories, on the other our
community of readers of our content and providing
feedback . On my side, I'm the Chief Digital Officer for The Economist. I've
been here three months so it's a fairly new role for me and prior to this, my
background was more technology-based. I was the CTO in a company called
Elsevier[1] which is the largest
publisher of medical and scientific journals, books, online in the world and I
was there for a number of years and before that I was a CTO at Standard and
Poor's[2] which is a financial services institution. What led me to this role
was...it was a crossroad in my career that I could see that digital was
disrupting what we do on a daily basis. Be it through our personal lives or be
it through business and I wanted to move both my technology skills and my
strategic business skills into a role that really blended these along with my passion
of how technology could serve its customers digitally and really, the Chief
Digital Officer allows me to both think from a technology delivery focus on
delivering great technology or delivery great content with technology but also
from a business focus of looking at the customer. What we really want from the second we serve them is
how can we use data and data analytics to serve them better.
For me, it's just a great role to have.
Mark Baker: Although you are quite early
in your development of your road map for The Economist, can you tell me about
your plans and experiences in creating digital road maps for your organisations?
Jora Gill: I'm actually developing a road map right now so I can actually talk
about what we're doing right now. So what I'm seeing is at the heart of
digital, if you put the technology aspect away, at the heart, it's really
getting closer to your customer and the customer is the centre of your
ecosystem. So with your customer in mind, how do you build a digital strategy?
What is it your customer's looking for? What experience are they looking for?
From our aspect, they're looking to read great content but they're looking to
read great content on any device that they're on or any situation that they
are. Be it travelling or they're stuck at home, they want to immerse in our
content or they want to a quick snap of our content. So therefore, you ask 'How
does our customer consume content?" and it's a multiple mobile devices.
What is our strategy for mobile devices? On the other hand, how is our customer
consuming other content on other products and do they want to integrate our
experience they have with us with other products through their mobile devices,
through their desktops and they probably do. So therefore, you need to be able
to be part of their daily lives. The other aspect of it is 'What's happening in
the disruptive world that we find ourselves in?' In digital building a five
year plan or a strategy is going to be very difficult when you're constantly
disrupted through new product sets. So therefore you say “Okay, we are going to
be disrupted and let's accept disruption as the new norm. Let's build our
products or platforms to accept that change is inevitable.” So instead of
building just a product that we hope will be used for five years, let's build
platforms that accept disruption as a constant but also allows us to leverage
that disruption. So when we see some really good CRM product, can we easily
swap our CRM with their CRM when we see really good responsive web front-end
design ask how can we take advantage of responsive easily when we see the
changing expectations of customers on what they want from content. So they
might want bite-size content, they might want a large periodical of content and
the bite-size might serve them well because they find themselves in a situation
where they're travelling and they want to immerse themselves in a topic such as
a visit to China. What do The Economist have to say about China and when I
arrive and land in China, I want to show the people that I'm talking to and
experience with, I've done some background so I just want that content right
now. So how can we take our content to give them what they're looking for right
now or if they're immersing themselves because they a deep reading experience
on a weekend. How do we give them right content at the right moment? So
customers are at the heart of what we do. This results in mapping our customer
journey going “Okay, through the daily life, through the daily week, through
the daily month of a customer, what do they do when they wake up from their
morning, what do they do?” They want a quick snapshot of content.in the morning
At lunchtime, they've got an hour, they've got a sandwich, they want to read a
bit more deeper. So why don't we take ourselves through the customer journey
and see how they want to immerse themselves with content? This is where
customer profiling plays a big part. We need to understand our customers
through their actions and this is where data analytics plays a big part.
So build platforms and customer journeys
then bring together is data. So data should really help us make our
experimentation decisions on new products, on what the customer deems valuable
through profiling the customer and understanding their habits. So a
company...we may think we've just created the best product in the world. If the
customer's not using it, our data will tell us the customer's not interested in
this great product that we've just built, therefore what insights can we take
from the customer experience of the product? Let's learn and put the lessons
into the next iteration of the product. So let's become more agile in the way
we actually deliver value for what we deem as a customer. Why it's difficult to
build a digital road map is because there's a constant change happening and a
constant expectation from our customers so we need to keep ripping out the
rulebook every 6 months, every year and going “Okay, that was important six
months ago, to the customer but right now, it's no longer valuable... they've
topped up on of what they deemed as the most valuable” and our data proves it.
Our data tells us that they're not coming back to us as often as they were on
that...So let's use that data and to say “Do another experiment. We believe the
customer's most important aspect of how they consume our digital content is X
and let's put X out there, let's do some more testing on X and if we find
actually, that is something of interest to our customer, let's persevere with
it. If it's not, let's prove it (the data will tell us) and let's decide...it
didn't work, fail and learn and move on.”
Mark
Baker: Can you talk about more about the
platform product dichotomy because that’s obviously a key part of being able to
allow you to do long-term planning.
Jora
Gill: Sure. So on the platform side, is...at the
heart of what we do is content and that content should be easily found by our
front-end tools. So we need to build a content repository if you like, that's
tagged cleverly. So when a customer's searching for something, it takes that
tagging and builds algorithms around that tagging allows the customer to
find easily, using taxonomies and ontologies, the content they're really
looking for. On the other hand, a customer may say “Look, I just want to read
the content.” So we need to assemble content very easily. So essentially, we
need to build modular content repositories that allow us to take advantage of
the immense content that we've had for many, many years. The Economist was
established in 1843. We weren't quite tagging our content back in 1843 but we
still have some fantastic content. So instead of thinking of The Economist as
just a newspaper that you consume cover to cover or beginning of the app to the
end , it's also pieces of content infographics, videos, audio the written word.
If you start tagging this content, you start building products that are
valuable to your customer and you're going “Okay, we never saw that.” We were
going down the linear route of saying “A customer's going to read our great
content, end-to-end” but now by tagging and building new content, we've
actually seen opportunities for increased customers value so it's building up
modular pieces on platform.
On the other hand, a customer looks above
the line on what they see in be it the apps or the web site. They're also
looking below the line that they want a great experience. So customer service
should be great in the digital world, CRM should be great, marketing should be
great and we're not marketing them products that they're not interested in and
so we have this 360 view of below the line of what the customers wants and experiences
above the line. So we want to take advantage of great CRM systems, great
marketing systems but we don't necessarily want to build those. We want to be
able to integrate those great systems into our architecture very easily and
then when those systems aren't cutting-edge or aren't what we believe is the
best agreed road map, we want to be able to remove them instantly and integrate
new forms.
So the platforms I'm talking about are
providing us competitive advantage by firstly building great content and
delivering this great content to the customers to experience but secondly we
also want to take the competitive advantage of best of breed systems in the CRM
space, the marketing space, in the eCommerce space by being able to plug in
those great tools into our digital ecosystem systems until we feel that they've
lost their competitive energy and somebody else is doing much better and we
swap in and out new systems into our digital platform. So it is lean enablement
of our architecture where architecture stops being a journey where you have to
land i.e. an architecture can no longer
be a as-is to a to-be exercise because with constant disruption we do not know
what the to-be is. Therefore what we really want is an enabling and evolving
architecture. We want an architecture that allows us to evolve and doesn't
hamper us from creating that
great experience or taking advantage of others who are creating great products
that we can integrate with.
. . . continued tomorrow . . .
The full text of all the interviews will appear in the forthcoming Chief Digital Officer Handbook
[1] Elsevier B.V. (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈɛlzəvir]) is an academic publishing company which publishes medical and
scientific literature. It is a part of the Reed Elsevier group. Leading
products include journals such as The Lancet and Cell, books such as Gray's
Anatomy, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, the Trends and
Current Opinion series of journals, and the online citation database Scopus.
Elsevier publishes 250,000 articles a year in 2,200 journals. Its archives
contain seven million publications. Total yearly downloads amount to 240
million. Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36% on revenues of US$3.2
billion.
[2] Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC (S&P) is an
American financial services company. It is a division of McGraw Hill Financial
that publishes financial research and analysis on stocks and bonds. S&P is
responsible for stock market indices the U.S.-based S&P 500, the Canadian
S&P/TSX, and the Australian S&P/ASX 200. S&P is considered one of
the Big Three credit-rating agencies.
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