Reusable Search Infrastructure

At U.S. Bank, I led a team responsible for developing a suite of reusable Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) components for the enterprise. This case study focuses on the development of a reusable Search component and the accompanying infrastructure required to support it. Key elements of the project include:

The problem

Our audit of site analytics, search logs, and call center data revealed several key issues:

• High search exit rates and frequent “no results” pages across the platform.
• An analysis of search terms related to “no results” occurrences and top call drivers indicated a need for more robust help content.
• The search experience was hard-coded across different channels and indexed various content sources, leading to inconsistent search results for the same queries on different platforms.
• A separate content database, used by internal bankers and housed in ServiceNow, contained the necessary information but was managed by a different team called Knowledge Center).

Key challenges:

• Fragmented content and an inadequate search algorithm resulted in unproductive searches, high bounce rates, and increased call volume.
• Siloed development led to a fragmented user experience and high maintenance costs, with content spread across three different databases, each managed by separate teams.
• The lack of a centralized budget or product team meant there was no alignment of content strategy or search functionality across channels. Different teams operated under separate CAPEX budgets, each with distinct objectives.

Getting buy-ins

U.S. Bank followed a CAPEX model, meaning newly-funded projects would not begin until the next calendar year at the earliest. Although my team was funded to build the component suite, the integration of different data sources was considered out of scope.

To address this, I was determined to persuade various product teams to collaborate and create a unified experience that could benefit everyone. By understanding each team’s motivations and pain points, I developed a plan to secure their support. I presented a proposal that outlined the redesign of the search experience, re-engineering data integration, and enabling a headless CMS.

Research

In this phase, I led the collaboration among the different teams, including my Platform team, Enterprise Search team, the marketing content strategists, and product managers/business analysts from three different product teams. Additionally, we engaged with various business groups across the bank throughout the process.

• Conducted audits of search logs, analytics, and call center data.
• Reviewed the search experience across channels and conducted usability testing with customers.
• Identified high-value queries that resulted in unproductive searches, leading to targeted content mapping and creation efforts.
• Audited the Knowledge Center’s content repository.
• Interviewed development teams to gather requirements for database connectivity, indexing, access control, log monitoring, and deployment workflows.
• Engaged with authors, content strategists, and SEO specialists to understand their needs for custom tagging, metadata control, and other content management strategies.

Defining the experience and organizational alignment

ServiceNow-AEM integration & Headless CMS

This phase was crucial for building the data infrastructure necessary for the search experience and component to function effectively, during which I led multiple engineering teams to consolidate content into a single source of truth.

We faced two conflicting choices:

• On one hand, as AEM is the enterprise’s preferred content management system, Platform leadership wanted to migrate content from ServiceNow to AEM.
• On the other hand, the Knowledge Center team strongly preferred to retain ServiceNow due to its various workflows, which are essential for managing the large volume and ever-changing nature of the content.

The decision hinged on a technical and cost analysis comparing:

1. Migrating Knowledge Center content into AEM and building out all necessary workflows,
2. Integrating ServiceNow content with AEM through APIs.

To facilitate this decision, I coordinated between my development team and the ServiceNow team to create a feasibility prototype for integrating ServiceNow data into AEM’s content fragments and designing a headless CMS architecture. This prototype aimed to assess the effort required for integration. After the cost analysis, we opted for the second option.

Once the performance and feasibility of the integration were confirmed through the prototype, I coordinated efforts between the ServiceNow and Platform teams to develop various APIs. I worked with the development teams to standardize the data structure, ensuring that the merged data could scale effectively. Additionally, I established new workflows among different teams to maintain data integrity and consistency following the integration.