Case Study
Content & Digital Systems
These engagements span EdTech, heritage, government, financial services, and virtual worlds. The sectors change. The thread running through all of them does not — finding the gap between what organisations intend and what people actually do, and building the clarity that lets both move forward.
Client names have been removed in line with standard consultancy confidentiality practice. References and further detail are available on request.
Investment Product Websites & Oracle FatWire CMS Migration
Financial Services Web Content Management — Hartford Life Insurance, USA
Context: Hartford Life managed three investor-facing corporate marketing websites covering annuity and mutual fund products. Content was tightly regulated — monthly fund performance rates, new product launches, and legally mandated disclosures (including state-specific font size requirements in Florida) all required accurate, timely publication. The engagement ran for over two years through PRT Group / enherent and included a significant CMS migration from a bespoke system to Oracle FatWire.
What I did: As sole website manager across all three sites, I owned the full content lifecycle from marketing brief to publication. I received monthly content briefs from the marketing team covering fund rate updates, new product announcements, and campaign changes, and translated these into structured content updates. I coordinated with graphic design and development on new product launches — reviewing assets, documenting size variations for marketing selection, and confirming technical specifications. All published content had to meet strict legal compliance requirements: mutual fund holdings disclosure, state insurance regulations, and SEC-adjacent accuracy standards.
For the Oracle FatWire migration, I participated in content design sessions — defining component completeness criteria, contributing to content architecture decisions, and planning template design. I was responsible for UAT sign-off at go-live, testing all content types, component behaviour, and compliance requirements before the new system went live. During a content audit I identified and resolved an SEC compliance risk before it reached regulatory review.
Outcome: Three live regulated financial services websites maintained accurately and on schedule across a two-year engagement, with a smooth CMS migration to Oracle FatWire and no regulatory incidents. The work established content governance patterns — naming conventions, asset documentation, compliance checklists — that persisted beyond the engagement.
Programme Management Practice Intranet & eLearning Content Suite
Enterprise Internal Content — CIGNA Healthcare, USA
Context: As part of the enherent consulting engagement at CIGNA Healthcare, I worked across two parallel workstreams: managing the Programme Management Practice intranet — a structured knowledge and resource hub for internal project managers — and designing a four-module eLearning content suite for new project managers joining the organisation.
What I did — Intranet: I managed weekly content releases to the Programme Management Practice intranet, maintaining accuracy, currency, and usability of a professional knowledge resource used by project managers across the organisation. This meant owning the content structure, navigation, and naming conventions as the repository grew, coordinating with internal stakeholders on requirements and review cycles, and ensuring sign-off before publication. I also contributed to enterprise process mapping in ARIS — documenting programme management workflows to support both the training content and the intranet's knowledge architecture, so content reflected how people actually worked rather than how we assumed they did.
What I did — eLearning: I designed and produced a four-module eLearning suite for new project managers — defining learning objectives, structuring content for a professional development audience, and delivering production-ready materials. Each module was structured around clear learning outcomes with deliberate progression from foundational concepts to applied practice across the four-part sequence.
Outcome: A well-structured, regularly maintained intranet knowledge hub supporting project managers organisation-wide, alongside a four-module eLearning suite that onboarded new PMs into the programme management practice. The engagement established repeatable content governance and release patterns for internal knowledge management.
Early Arabic Printed Books from the British Library - UK
Digital Primary Sources Platform — Gale / Cengage Learning
Challenge: Create the first full-text searchable digital library of early printed books in Arabic script (1475–1900), spanning religion, law, science, mathematics, travel, history, and literature. The collection needed to support Arabic OCR, right-to-left interfaces, complex metadata, and integration with library discovery systems.
What I did: Collaborated with content engineers to design and refine XML schemas for Arabic, transliterated, and European-language texts; normalised metadata across thousands of volumes; and led the transformation of 2.2 million XML files across three countries. Authored conversion guides adopted across teams, supported Arabic OCR pipelines, and ensured alignment with Library of Congress subject indexing and Gale's cross-search platform.
Outcome: Delivered a stable, searchable, multilingual archive used globally by scholars, with rich metadata and full-text search across Arabic-language content. The programme contributed to nearly £4m in pre-sales for Gale's digitisation portfolio and established a repeatable model for future primary source collections.
Seventeenth & Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers Collection
Newspapers, Pamphlets & Broadsheets — Gale / Cengage Learning
Challenge: Digitise and make searchable 296 bound volumes of 17th–18th century English newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and broadsheets (1672–1737). The material was typographically inconsistent, often damaged, and heavily dependent on OCR quality, with significant metadata gaps across 300+ titles.
What I did: Modelled and normalised metadata for newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and broadsheets; structured issue and volume relationships; and supported OCR-driven search by linking text output to facsimile images. Helped enable advanced discovery features such as Term Frequency, Topic Finder, and cross-search capability, and contributed to MARC mapping and metadata alignment for integration with Primo, Summon, EDS, WorldCat Discovery, and SirsiDynix.
Outcome: Delivered a fully searchable, OCR-driven archive that fills major gaps in early English press history, with modern discovery tools layered over historically inconsistent content. Researchers can now explore over 150,000 articles across 300+ titles with rich search, visualisation, and cross-collection capabilities.
Structured Content & Metadata
Cross‑Organisation Content Architecture — Cengage, Preservica, Talis Aspire
Challenge: Across multiple organisations, I worked with large, complex content ecosystems that depended on structured metadata, consistent content models, and reliable search and discovery. Each environment had its own constraints — XML‑based scholarly archives at Cengage, archival metadata and preservation schemas at Preservica, and structured reading list metadata with discovery integrations at Talis Aspire.
What I did: I designed and governed structured content models that supported both human users and machine‑driven systems. This included XML schema design for digital collections, metadata normalisation across millions of files, MARC mapping for library discovery systems, and structured content for reading list editing and digitisation workflows. At Talis Aspire, I delivered API integrations with WorldCat, GOBI, OASIS, EBSCO, and Browns Books, ensuring metadata consistency across discovery and acquisition platforms. At Preservica, I contributed to metadata alignment and UI/UX improvements for archival search and navigation.
Outcome: Delivered reliable, scalable content structures that improved search accuracy, reduced manual effort, and strengthened interoperability across systems. These models supported OCR‑driven search, faceted discovery, cross‑collection search, and library‑system integrations — enabling users to find and use content more effectively across academic, archival, and higher‑education platforms.
Learning & Continuous Improvement: Troubleshooting at Scale
Content Conversion Pipeline — Gale / Cengage Learning
Large-scale XML transformation work is never just about schemas and metadata — it is about the operational systems that move millions of files across continents. During a multi-year digitisation programme, I worked closely with content engineers in Michigan and UK-based web operations to keep complex release pipelines running smoothly.
One evening, a major batch of XML files was transferring from the UK to Michigan when a network outage caused some files to arrive intact, some corrupted, and some to fail outright. With releases of this size, a single broken batch could cost days. By 9:30am UK time I could see the fallout, but the US team would not be online for several hours.
Drawing on my business process re-engineering background, I recognised the bottleneck: I was waiting for other teams to wake up before I could even begin troubleshooting. Working with a PERL scripter, I gained access to the error logs and a deeper understanding of the conversion scripts. The webserver administrator granted access to staging locations, and between them I gained access to the cron jobs that controlled automated processing.
With logs, staging, and cron access, I could diagnose failures immediately, restart or re-queue broken jobs, correct malformed files, and validate successful transfers — often preventing multi-day delays by resolving issues before the US team came online. I also changed my working pattern on release days, staying later to ensure full batches completed cleanly before leaving the building.
This experience shaped my approach to digital systems: give people the right access, the right visibility, and the right structure, and they can solve problems faster, earlier, and with far less drama.
Want to discuss a specific challenge?
Every engagement is different. If you'd like to talk through something that doesn't fit neatly into the above, I'm happy to have that conversation.