BP: Building a ‘Write Once, Publish Anywhere’ Culture with Arc XP, Powered by AWS

For BP, a global energy company, maintaining a clear communications strategy across internal and external communications was an enormously difficult task. At the same time, it could not afford a disruptive technology overhaul to solve the problem. With Arc XP, a headless CMS powered by AWS technology, BP was able to consolidate its multiple publishing platforms into one, bringing increased efficiency and communication consistency to its internal communications. 

With more than 70,000 employees across 79 countries and 16 languages and supporting an additional 200,000 other jobs through its business activities, maintaining BP’s integral corporate identity took a monumental effort. Leading this effort was BP’s communications team, who owned the task of representing the company both internally to current and future employees, and externally, to everyone from consumers to the media to government officials. Internal communications proved especially difficult. Too often communications teams worked in siloes across several communication channels. This in turn caused mixed messages and disconnects which led to confusion, and ultimately, apathy.

“That was causing a lot of people to disengage with, certainly, internal communications,” explained Ben Jefferies, Head of Global Publishing at BP. “People have channel overload and they don’t know what to receive. Our teams don’t know where to post stuff. They don’t know what their audiences is receiving or what they’re seeing.”

One of the biggest contributors to these challenges was the development and delivery of content. Although BP had a CMS, it didn’t contain all the places content was being developed – email content was written in a separate tool, dotdigital, and rather than maintaining a single corporate intranet, there were hundreds of internal sites with global editors around the world. Delivery proved to be equally challenging as BP employed four different systems to serve its content.

With a CMS already in place, the communications team wanted a solution that would consolidate its content into a single source from its intranet to internal chat on Yammer to its enewsletter – the benefits would be felt worldwide. Jeffries also knew that ease of use was paramount, so one of his key metrics was the total amount of content being published on internal platforms. 

“The so-called holy grail will be having all communications created in one place,” Jefferies continued. “So we can then see the end consumption metrics for the stories being published across multiple end points that use different consumption metrics.” 

Arc’s microservices architecture, powered by AWS, facilitated that strategy. While content would be viewed on various channels around the world, it would now be driven from a single place. For the thousands of global BP content creators, Arc’s intuitive interface meant that content publishing would now be a pushbutton process.  

“Wherever they want to publish it – Yammer, social media, etc. – can be done in one place,” Jefferies explained. “All I have to do now is push a different button and it will go into the news part of my website.”

For Jefferies, the business case for Arc was clear: efficiency and productivity. By leveraging Arc to eliminate the usage of four individual content delivery systems into one, BP experienced a nearly 75 percent reduction in the time it took to publish content, with an almost equal reduction in new employee onboarding. 

What’s more, having this single source of truth drove increased communication consistency across teams and continues to facilitate productivity and continuous improvements. 

“Arc allows our communications professionals to concentrate on producing content rather than navigating multiple publishing systems,” said Geoff Morrell, Global Head of Communications & External Affairs for BP. “What’s more, its flexibility fits perfectly with our ‘write once, publish anywhere’ strategy for digital publishing.”