The need for a strong people function in a world of change has never been more important to drive business outcomes. But CIPD's ability to reach, serve and retain the professionals who needed it most was being held back by ageing technology, disconnected data, and a digital experience that couldn't keep pace with how its members actually worked.
Like many membership organisations, CIPD had grown its web estate over years of accumulated decisions — multiple platforms, legacy content management systems, siloed teams, and no unified view of the customer journey. The result was a digital experience that felt fragmented to members and difficult to manage internally.
The organisation needed to move from a membership body with a UK and professional body focus to an active global community that champions and shapes work. That required a fundamental transformation of its digital infrastructure, its ways of working, and its internal capability to sustain both.
"The vision was clear: to connect our data, technology and experiences so we can be more agile and innovative, and continuously optimise customer experience, impact work, and drive growth."
David Cox, Director of Digital & Technology, CIPDRewired was brought in at the earliest stage — not to recommend a technology solution, but to lead the thinking about what the transformation needed to achieve and whether the organisation had the conditions to deliver it.
Working alongside CIPD's Director of Digital and senior leadership, we led a comprehensive Discovery phase — six months of stakeholder workshops, customer research, technical audits, content audits, KPI design, and information architecture. This produced the strategic foundation and the business case that would govern the entire programme.
The business case set out three interlocking strategic objectives: responding to the evolving digital needs of CIPD's customers; building the internal digital skills and capabilities of key teams; and deploying the right technology to enable both. Technology was the third objective, not the first — a distinction that shaped every decision that followed.
The most important architectural decision in the programme wasn't which platform to choose. It was how to structure the organisation to run it.
Rewired designed two new internal operating teams — a Content Operations function responsible for governance, content strategy, and the quality of every customer interaction across the platform; and a Product Operations function responsible for platform management, data integration, and the continuous improvement of the digital experience.
These weren't new job titles bolted onto existing structures. They were cross-functional teams with defined roles, responsibilities, and ways of working — designed to replace the pattern of external agency dependency that had characterised the previous model. Every new team member was identified, onboarded, and trained as part of the programme itself. Content design, search performance, CMS workflows, data dashboards, and customer experience principles were all delivered as structured capability programmes, not as one-off training sessions.
The delivery engine was completed by two specialist partners: Optimizely, providing the Digital Experience Platform — a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader — with full hosting, infrastructure and security management; and twentysix, responsible for multi-phase technical delivery of the new website and integrated functionality.
The programme ran across seven phases from July 2022, each designed to deliver value progressively rather than waiting for a single large release. Phase 1 replaced the legacy CMS and launched the new Optimizely platform with a redesigned information architecture, consistent brand, and content personalisation. Phase 2 introduced content subscriptions and cross-site recommendations — opening CIPD's knowledge to non-member audiences for the first time. Phases 3 through 7 deepened integrations with Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, and CIPD's broader technology estate, introduced digital accounts, AI-driven personalisation, and established the infrastructure for continuous innovation.
Programme governance was structured around clear accountability at every level: a programme board with senior leadership sponsorship, working groups for content, technology, data and change, and a PMO function Rewired helped design and stood up at the outset. Risk was managed actively throughout — the business case identified nine significant programme risks, each with a defined mitigation, and the phased delivery model was specifically designed to isolate dependency effects and protect core deliverables.
The best measure of what a digital transformation delivers is what a customer can do that they couldn't before. For Faisal — a first-time people manager dealing with a surge of flexible working requests after a return-to-office mandate — the new CIPD platform became his first port of call rather than an afterthought.
He found the CIPD's guidance through organic search, downloaded a practical guide in exchange for his contact details, and received a follow-up sequence of genuinely relevant content — not a generic welcome email, but articles and courses specifically mapped to what he'd read. A week later, personalised course recommendations led him to book an employment law course. His activity was visible to CIPD's Employer Solutions team, who used it to identify and approach the HR Director of his organisation — a CIPD member herself — with a targeted proposal for a block subscription of knowledge content for people managers across the company.
That journey — from organic search to individual member to organisational subscription — is what the platform was built to enable. It required the right content, the right personalisation infrastructure, the right data flows between systems, and the right internal teams to keep it running and improving. All of it was in place at programme close.
At programme close, CIPD had a modern digital experience platform — a Gartner Magic Quadrant-recognised technology stack, integrated with Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, and CIPD's broader data estate. Its content teams had the tools, the workflows, and the training to produce, govern, and continuously improve the content that drives member engagement. Its product team had the capability to manage the platform, interpret data, and make decisions without external support.
The two new internal operating teams — Content Ops and Product Ops — now run the roadmap. The digital experience continues to improve. The dependency on external agencies for core delivery is gone.
That is what a successful digital transformation looks like: not a new website, but an organisation that is permanently more capable than it was before.
