INSEAD

The Client

INSEAD is The Business School for the World. With locations in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and now North America, INSEAD's business education and research spans four regions. Its 165 renowned faculty members from 41 countries inspire more than 1,300 degree participants annually in its MBA, Global Executive MBA, Specialized Master's degrees (Executive Master in Finance and Executive Master in Change), and Ph.D. programs. In addition, more than 11,000 executives participate in INSEAD Executive Education programs each year.

The Situation

INSEAD wanted to enhance its overall digital experience, improving engagement and strengthening brand identity. It wanted its new website to empower the organization with a more agile, efficient, and unified digital platform, aligning technology with business strategy to drive growth and success. 

The Challenge

INSEAD faced numerous challenges on its journey to optimize its digital experience. 

• It needed to centralize a vision across departments that each had their own respective inspiration
• Its previous architecture wasn't compatible with automation solutions, meaning the organization would need to manually migrate almost 3,000 pages

The Solution

INSEAD partnered with Srijan and the teams kicked off the project by focusing on several key areas to create a more engaging, cohesive, and effective digital presence. In doing so, the organization aligned its technology with its business strategy to drive growth and success.

Migration from a legacy environment to Drupal: INSEAD needed to migrate from its legacy environment to Drupal with minimal interruptions in site performance, ensuring a seamless transition while keeping both structured and unstructured content unaltered. INSEAD seamlessly migrated to Drupal and now enjoys a single code base. It set up a core profile for easy onboarding of new brands, and multisite setup and content migration was as efficient as possible.

Advanced search implementation: The organization wanted to enhance its site usability, user engagement and satisfaction by providing a more robust and efficient search experience. The teams built adaptive and personalized journeys that take prospective students through an advanced program finder search. 

Integration with third-party platforms: The teams collaborated to integrate INSEAD’s web platform with Salesforce, Magento, Blackthorn, Kaltura, AKADEMIA, Eventbrite, and Qualtrics, capturing user action to create elaborate user journeys using a Tealium integration. Additionally, the team deployed market automation through the native implementation of Eloqua forms and introduced a hybrid architecture to fuel mobile applications with REST API content. It streamlined editorial journeys with automated integrations with external systems and empowered content pushes on mobile applications via a Paddix integration.

Unification of brand elements: INSEAD needed to strengthen its brand identity, unifying brand elements to create a cohesive image across various digital touchpoints. Srijan built a component library with 100+ reusable components and created a centralized repository in a standalone Storybook outside Drupal.

Enriched editorial experience: The organization also wanted to optimize content workflows and improve efficiency and effectiveness in content creation, management, and editing. It improved the back-end experience by centralizing events, forms, and program creation, reusing components to reduce the number of forms from 250 to 30. The team implemented creative dashboards and strategic content templating, leading to better structured content, customizable layouts, and better media management. Additionally, simplified editorial workflows meant content authors needed to take minimal steps to publish, and reusable components reduced the overall time it takes to publish content. 

Smoother loading and animation effects: Srijan helped make aesthetic enhancements to the website in order to improve the user experience and reduce bounce rates. As a result, the improved website experience met performance benchmarks for high availability of traffic and conversions.

Additionally, as part of the platform revamp project, Srijan used Acquia BLT, which enabled deployment setup from day one, ensured security standards, and simplified scripts with straightforward BLT commands. Using out-of-the-box (OOTB) recipes led to a 60-70% time savings on configurations, enforced coding standards with PHP Code Sniffer, and optimized performance with phpstan via BLT. And the team leveraged BLT for data and file sync with sanitization, de-risking privacy violations, and enabling server-less database access for the development team.

Acquia's multisite capability was instrumental in hosting multiple sites, delivering cost efficiency and simplifying maintenance. And Acquia Cloud Platform's integrated deployment pipeline meant the development team established continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) without additional DevOps resources, enhancing agility and responsiveness. Acquia Cloud Platform's reverse proxy caching strategy helped the organization meet its performance KPI of providing a faster and better user experience, and seamless Acquia Search integration has helped INSEAD build adaptive and personalized search experiences for students to find the right academic program for them.

The Results

INSEAD’s metrics show that the new platform’s results have exceeded the organization’s target values. Specifically:

First Contentful Paint (FCP)

• Planned Target Value: 2 seconds
• Actual Value: 0.74 seconds
• Result: Achieved 1.26 seconds better than target
   

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Planned Target Value: 80+
• Actual Value: 90+
• Result: Achieved ~12% more than target
   

Performance

• Planned Target Value: 80+
• Actual Value: 95
• Result: Achieved 15% more than target
   

Accessibility

• Planned Target Value: 80+
• Actual Value: 94
• Result: Achieved 14% more than target
   

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

• Planned Target Value: 2 seconds
• Actual Value: 1.38 seconds
• Result: Achieved 0.62 seconds better than target
   

Best Practices

• Planned Target Value: 80+
• Actual Value: 88
• Result: Achieved 8% more than target
   

Cumulative Layout Shift

• Planned Target Value: 0.1 seconds
• Actual Value: 0.1 seconds
• Result: Maintained the target
   

From a business point of view, the platform redesign has streamlined user journeys for all stakeholders. User access management allows faculty members to log in and manage their profiles using specific components, including awards received, publications, and bios. Salesforce integration has simplified work for different departments to manage their programs' metadata in one consolidated place. And Drupal webform integration with Eloqua means that the marketing team can add new marketing campaigns without developer dependency.