Telegraph Media Group: Spreading The Cloud

Telegraph Media Group is a major convert to the Cloud Computing model with HR, CRM and office productivity applications in The Cloud - and possibly finance to come...

While Cloud Computing is often thought of as being something for the SME, there is an increasingly high number of large-scale deployments proving that the Cloud model can scale to the demands of the enterprise. Among the most dedicated proponents of Cloud Computing is The Telegraph Media Group which to date has rolled out Google Apps for office productivity tools, Salesforce.com for subscriber management and customer interaction and SuccessFactors for performance management with the prospect of finance and other back office functions to follow.

The Telegraph has been going through radical transformation,î says CIO Paul Cheeseborough. ìIt's moving away from being the print publication done on a daily basis that it's been for the past 150 years and transforming into a digital organisation where the newspaper is still a product of course, but sits alongside a lot of other products and services. The website telegraph.co.uk is the number two in the country with 23 million unique users a month. A third of that traffic comes from the UK, a third from the US and a third from the rest of the world. We have been growing that business aggressively while the newspaper industry has a whole feels the pinch, so we have as an organisation a big focus on the Web.î

Changing times
The Telegraph Media Group was bought by the Barclay Brothers in 2004 and shortly afterwards moved into spectacular offices by Victoria train station in London. That was part of a wider transformation of how the Group addressed how it works. ìWe got into an open plan building and set up a hub and spoke arrangement in the news room where each spoke is a content team, such as news or sport or travel or motoring and so on,î recalls Cheeseborough. ìThe content is generated with the hub in the middle of the room to use that content for the newspaper or the website. We also integrated roles in order to make sure that the spokes generate and create content rather than for a web page or a newspaper page specifically. It needs to be content that can be used for any platform we choose. And there's also been a culture change, a revolution to ensure that people drive and produce great products and services.î

All of this has inevitably put certain strains on how the group works. ìWe have and had systems that have been in place for years that are creaking under the strains of the new ways of working. We want people to be able to work on the move, to be able to submit content via mobile devices,î says Cheeseborough. ìSo there are areas where we are transitioning. We have been faced with options and decisions to make at a time when the economy is where it is and budgets are where they are. It's all about doing more with less. This makes Cloud Computing appealing from a number of perspectives. The first thing is the matter of agility and speed. We were able to transition off of our old legacy infrastructure on a new one efficiently and quickly.

ìThere's also the matter of the cost point as we're now dealing with a total cost of ownership calculation rather than a one-off licence payment. It's about not having to worry about having to have support staff and testing and hidden costs. The third point is around innovation. We're trying to attract a workforce that is very digitally-minded. They like being able to use applications via a browser. They want to be able to be out of the office but still be able to access the same information as if there were in the office. They are much more demanding about the types of functionality that they have at their fingertips. A four year recycles of systems is not acceptable to them; it's now a matter of months to wait for new functionality.î

Many Clouds
The Telegraph Media Group has deployed Cloud Computing in a variety of forms. ìWe introduced Salesforce.com before last Christmas in order to manage our newspaper subscriptions. We have a call centre to manage inbound and outbound calls from subscribers. Salesforce.com is integrated with the telephony system,î says Cheeseborough. ìLast summer we implemented Google Apps after we decided that there was a lack of clarity coming out of Microsoft about where their Office products were going. We were sceptical initially about Google and its enterprise capabilities, but after a trial with 10% of our estate we found that there was no issue. As we rolled out the apps, we found that people were refusing to give them up.

ìWe have recently rolled out SuccessFactors in connection with our training need. Staff retention is key to us and we need to be able to evolve and grow our high performers. We are looking for a 360 degree view of staff, objectives setting, objectives tracking and training needs. The interesting thing is that we see this as a cultural projects, not a technology project.î

That's a hefty enterprise Cloud commitment for any firm to make. In many cases large organisations run into resistance from their IT people over such large scale roll outs but Cheeseborough feels that this is to miss a truck. ìAll too often the IT department is the department that says no,î he notes. ìIn a business that is static that's fine if you have an infrastructure in place, but in a business that's changing, then you have such an attitude at your own peril. When you go to conferences about The Cloud, it's true that 70-80% of CIOs do see it as a threat rather than an opportunity, but that's a bit of a blind attitude and usually related to concerns about security or uptime. But they need to look at the kind of companies that are into The Cloud and see how it's become their life blood. There is a gulf growing between the old style CIO and the new.

ìYou have got to have a CEO who is supportive. The Telegraph Media Group is a good sized firm, but we do have limited resources like everyone else and we could be said to be punching above our weight with all this. But there's a sensible approach. Our HR function for example is incredibly mature and forward thinking. We worked together with them to package up what performance management meant to us as an organisation and then took our board members through that. That then got us to the stage of thinking how we could deliver on it and as quickly as possible. We had one or two potential solutions in mind, one of which was on premise. But it was a rapid decision making process to go with a Cloud Computing approach.î

Cheeseborough thinks that Cloud Computing is entering the mainstream technology landscape. ìIt was a case that no-one really understood the term or was that comfortable with it,î he admits. ìThere was some baggage around outsourcing and this was seen as a sort of managed service. But you do retain control with Cloud Computing, it's not a case of your outsourcing your business processes, you're just tapping into a platform that's already there and running. For CEOs it's now on the radar, that was the big breakthrough last year. There are good landmark implementations that are being talked about openly now.î

Cloud on the horizon
So what's next for The Telegraph Media Group? Will accounting, finance and other back office functions move to The Cloud as well? ìMy vision on this is that the back office can be run in The Cloud,î says Cheeseborough. ìWe all have a back office and we all think that we're unique and different. By putting the back office in The Cloud, we free ourselves up to do other things. So we are looking. We are looking at Coda and its on demand offering. We are due to do an upgrade of our finance systems so we're keeping our roadmap open on that.î

Cheeseborough reckons that it's time for more companies to look long and hard at Cloud Computing as a viable option, but concedes that it calls for a degree of nerve still. ìYou definitely have to put your head above the parapet to make these decisions,î he says. ìBut when people understand that the consumer tools on the web are more advanced than the corporate tools they're used to then the message gets through. Googlemail is an integrated experience with chat, search and an inbox limit of 25g. Compare to that to the web version of Outlook. When you do that comparison, people back down.î