1 Dennis Van Allemeersch 1

TITEL

Changing Tech Stack as

key driver for Digital

Transformation at HotelSpecials

Dennis Van Allemeersch

Marketing Technology congres, Maarssen

Dec. 1st, 2015

2 Dennis Van Allemeersch 2

INTRO

3 Dennis Van Allemeersch 3

4 Dennis Van Allemeersch 4

Online

Travel

Agency

2002

~110

Hotel Booker ?

5 Dennis Van Allemeersch 5

What is

HotelSpecials trying

to achieve with it's

digital

transformation ?

What changes are

being made in it's

tech stack to that

purpose and why ?

And what have

been some

important lessons

learned to date ?

6 Dennis Van Allemeersch 6

Faster

Higher quality /

productivity

Future proof

7 Dennis Van Allemeersch 7

IT’S TEAM NOT TECH

8 Dennis Van Allemeersch 8

What did we change ?

New departments

• (technical) Product Managers

(by function)

• BigData & Analytics

Changed people

• Developers

9 Dennis Van Allemeersch 9

Hard recruiting lessons learned

WHY WHO

WHAT HOW

10 Dennis Van Allemeersch 10

PROCESSES AS GLUE

11 Dennis Van Allemeersch 11

Key process change ?

False security Work agile

Think Big – Start Small

(<> Command/Control)

12 Dennis Van Allemeersch 12

Also here it’s about people

Scrum master

are you

How to make it stick ? Top down Leadership

Team, not alpha males Key role

13 Dennis Van Allemeersch 13

Other process lessons learned

SEEING = BELIEVING

14 Dennis Van Allemeersch 14

TECH STACK – BEGIN ?

15 Dennis Van Allemeersch 15

Overhaul from

Legacy to

complete New tech stack

16 Dennis Van Allemeersch 16

Transformation takes time …

Not 3 months

Not 1 year

But 2-3 years

Finding right people, Familiarizing, Adjusting processes,

Starting, Reaping results

17 Dennis Van Allemeersch 17

Bottom-up approach

18 Dennis Van Allemeersch 18

Migrate through 2-track approach

Challenge: different (release) speed

19 Dennis Van Allemeersch 19

START: HOSTING/ DATA

20 Dennis Van Allemeersch 20

Switched hosting:

More flexibele

Better pricing

Future proof tech

Servers from:

120

to …

45

21 Dennis Van Allemeersch 21

Learned some things along the way

Less is More 65% capacity

=> false security

Minimise distance

external hosting -

internal developpers

Transparancy in

Documentation

22 Dennis Van Allemeersch 22

CODE SWITCH

23 Dennis Van Allemeersch 23

From PHP to GoLang

24 Dennis Van Allemeersch 24

Simple Http server

25 Dennis Van Allemeersch 25

Most performant

26 Dennis Van Allemeersch 26

COLLABORATION

27 Dennis Van Allemeersch 27

Jira > tickets

Confluence > documentation

Scrum Boards > status

28 Dennis Van Allemeersch 28

Automated unit testing

(status: 40% FE; 65% BE server code)

29 Dennis Van Allemeersch 29

WHY > RESULTS > LESSONS

Stable and reliable

releases

Right tools = enablers

(<> manual Excel interventions)

Invest in how to do releases & proper documentation

5x / year > Continuous

1,5h / release > 20 min

30 Dennis Van Allemeersch 30

Scalable A/B testing capability

From Optimizely > Google TagManager > Embedded platform

GTM limitations in scaling up

# tests / year x15 ! with 25-30% succes rate !

31 Dennis Van Allemeersch 31

HARD CORE

32 Dennis Van Allemeersch 32

Re-wrote custom build bookings engine

33 Dennis Van Allemeersch 33

Kibana for real-time Demand insights

More flexible & personalised vs Google UA

Challenges: make actionable for business, attribution modelling

34 Dennis Van Allemeersch 34

Elastic for Search

Faster for big data

Not re-inventing the wheel

35 Dennis Van Allemeersch 35

NEXT: SCALE

36 Dennis Van Allemeersch 36

ESP

Stay with Selligent but upgrade

> increase productivity (dynamic templates)

37 Dennis Van Allemeersch 37

CRM

From to Scope to SF ?

> using all functionalities / capacilities ?

38 Dennis Van Allemeersch 38

DMP

Now none (Relay42 ?)

> control over own data

> scalable personalisation & targetting

Winners Dutch E-mail Marketing Award 2015

# bookings x2,5 => scale & repeat

39 Dennis Van Allemeersch 39

Need as much application managers

as marketeers

About marketing processes first & foremost

Automation follows