Shift to digital a catalyst for technology platform change

HainesAttract’s ambitious redesign of the company’s offerings to cater the new-look digital recruiting market required a serious re-investment in their technology.

When the shift from print-centric to digital-centric advertising arose, HainesAttract – the largest placer of job advertisements in New Zealand – initially employed its own internal development team to develop a proprietary technology platform, integrated to all the leading job boards, for managing the job advertisement and recruitment process. However, this approach became increasingly problematic.

Problem: The internal development team were frequently disconnected from management

Unable to effectively respond to the changing business needs. This left Haines with a platform that did not leverage best practice and was at risk of becoming obsolete, as well as a team who were misaligned with the company’s business objectives.

Solution: Walkerscott was engaged to provide technology leadership and strategy.

Our first step in assisting HainesAttract to reposition their legacy technology was to fully understand the company’s business strategy and determine how its technology platforms could best enable this strategy.

We then assisted the senior leadership team in aligning their technology roadmap to their business strategy. An outcome of this was a restructuring and outsourcing of their development team, while retaining subject matter experts in house. This was followed by a major technology overhaul and update, including:

• Full architecture and code review of HainesAttract’s platforms
• Full platform upgrades from Windows Server 2003, .NET v1.0 and SQL Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008, .NET v4.5 and SQL Server 2008 R2
• Intervention and management to complete a failing project that was critical to the business
• Replacement of internal CMS with an open source alternative
• Replacement of legacy Coldfusion components by rewriting in .NET
• Implementation of a project/issue/support system and process
• Ongoing provision of business logic technical documentation
• Migration of entire platform from on-premise

We also migrated HainesAttract’s entire platform from an on-premise company owned infrastructure to an industry-leading cloud hosting platform.

Outcome: Modern platform aligned with business objectives

Outsourcing development to Walkerscott and executing on a series of modernisation initiatives has enabled HainesAttract to utilise their technology to the full.

What was once an increasingly risky investment due to technology obsolescence has been successfully turned around as a result of Walkerscott’s involvement. HainesAttract’s technology platforms are now of industry best practice standard and easily maintained and supported while the cost of development has also been reduced through outsourcing and overhauling development.

With Walkerscott’s agile development approach, HainesAttract’s management team now has full confidence that initiatives will be delivered on time, to budget, and with full alignment to business objectives.