CASE STUDY 01 / 16DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONENGINEERING LEADERSHIPHANDS-ON ENGINEERING
From a business run on paper to one run on its own software.
Digital transformation at BMI Global Ed
BMI Global Ed runs student recruitment fairs. Universities from abroad pay to take a stand in a city, local students come to meet them, and each university leaves with the details of the students who want to study there: its leads. The business had run its fairs on manual processes since 1987. Over eleven years, from its only engineer to its Director of Technology and Product, I led it onto its own software, one department at a time.
MY PART
Coded its first systems alone, then directed its department-by-department move onto its own software.
ORGANISATION
BMI Global Ed, now part of Times Higher Education, the university-rankings publisher
TIMELINE
2015 to today. Head of Engineering and Product from 2018, Director of Technology and Product from 2022
SCOPE
Sales, Marketing, Event Operations, Products and Engineering, in a business that has grown from 2 countries to 18
FIG.01 · THE LIFE OF A FAIR, DEPARTMENT BY DEPARTMENT, ILLUSTRATIVE
11Years, from the organisation’s only engineer to its Director of Technology and Product
70%Cut in annual engineering costs, growing one developer into an offshore team of five that sustains 14 systems
80%Cut in marketing operational overhead
+67%Event sign-ups, from bringing in analytics and A/B testing
01THE FIRST BET
Persuading a business that did not need to change
The fairs had run successfully since 1987, so no crisis forced the change. I joined as the only engineer, and my manager resigned in my second week, leaving me the whole technology estate, its technical debt and very little budget. The first job was persuading the directors to invest in technology the business did not yet need, in the terms they already cared about: reach, sign-ups and cost.
→From standard web hosting to AWS.
→A suite of APIs integrating the siloed internal systems, the foundation everything later was built on. I authored the founding commit and core architecture of the multi-country platform that served the business for ten years.
→Measurement from a cold start. Google Analytics and A/B testing increased event sign-ups by 67%.
→An offshore team to take on the debt. I pitched a low-cost engineering team in the Philippines, grew the one-person technology function into a team of five, and cut annual engineering costs by 70%.
02EVERY TEAM, ONTO ITS OWN SOFTWARE
Department by department
Each department was siloed and ran its work its own way, by hand. I introduced Agile company-wide and brought the non-engineers onto tools they could use: Trello for the work, and MoSCoW (must, should, could, won’t) for priorities. Then I met each department’s lead directly and turned their needs into the roadmap. Each project below links to its own case study.
CODED
wrote it myself
CO-CODED
wrote it with other developers
LED
directed the team that built it
COMMISSIONED
specified it; a vendor built it
01 · 3 PROJECTS
Sales and Marketing B2B Team
Brings universities and institutions in to exhibit and advertise, and sells them stands, placements and contracts.
with the Sales Director and the CEO
Tech caseFor the Education in Ireland bid, written beside the CEO’s commercial case
The Education in Ireland bidI wrote the technology case beside the CEO’s commercial case: a paperless fair needs fewer people on site, and its printed materials, paperwork and shipping largely disappear. The bid won the contract, now a standing arrangement across the US, Africa, India and Mexico.
02 · 5 PROJECTS
Marketing B2C Team
Fills the fairs with students.
with the Marketing Director
+67%Event sign-ups, from analytics and A/B testing
−80%Marketing operational overhead, as campaign volume went up
CODEDOne-click email campaignsHundreds of per-city emails, each carrying that fair’s date, venue, universities and seminars, generated from the registration data instead of coded one at a time.
Decides what BMI sells to universities beyond the fair itself. Product joined my title in 2018, as Head of Engineering and Product, and stayed in it when I became Director of Technology and Product in 2022.
with directors, exhibitors, the operations team and a vendor team
7 daysIdea to a deployed, reviewable prototype
+300%Content platform’s annual revenue, in the first year of the model
BEFORE
Banner ads that gave clients little back
Fair data used only for reports and marketing lists
The department I built underneath the others, from one person to an offshore team of five, and managed directly through daily standups, task assignment and written specifications.
leading the offshore team in the Philippines day to day
−70%Annual engineering costs
Months → weeksDelivery timelines, after the AI retraining
Every project above runs on one estate, arranged around one central API. I built the first versions, then led their replacements: the multi-country platform I founded in 2015 served the business for ten years before the central API took its place, and the lead-capture app I coded in 2017 was rebuilt by a vendor to my specification. When Times Higher Education acquired the business, I led the technology due diligence.
In March 2020 lockdown made the physical fair season impossible to deliver within days. A business built on people in rooms had to go online, with no digital event platform and no time to build one. It managed because everything behind the fairs was already digital: only the fairs themselves still happened in person.
FIG.02 · SAME BACK END, NEW FRONT END
→The operations team’s instinct was a bespoke platform with video. I judged it unrealistic on the timeline, evaluated the options including building on Zoom’s API, and steered the business to repurposing Brazen, a virtual platform built for job recruitment, into a student-recruitment one.
→I engineered the one piece that needed engineering: inbound webhooks from Brazen, outbound registration forwarding and lead distribution, so every exhibiting university got its leads back in exactly the format physical fairs had always given them.
→It took two months from choosing Brazen to the first live digital fair, because the earlier integration work was already there: going digital meant connecting a new front end to a back end that was already digital.
→The revenue figure is the business’s, measured across all fairs; my part in it is the technology.
05WHAT STAYED HARD
What stayed hard
A transformation that lists only wins is not believed. Two honest boundaries.
→Not every system was modernised to the same standard. Modern engineering governance went onto the systems built once that capability existed in the organisation; older systems were held stable and aged out rather than retrofitted. The split was chronological, not a strategy chosen in advance.
→Some outcomes belong to the business, not to me alone. The COVID revenue doubling is measured on total fairs revenue, and the Education in Ireland win was a bid the CEO led. My part in both is the technology.
06HOW I LED
How I led
[a] MAKING THE CASE
Investment cases to the CEO, COO and directorsBid writingTechnology due diligence
[b] PRODUCT
Customer researchRequirements documentsPricing and packagingPrototypes before spend