Alignment Fuels Cars.com Rollout Wisconsin

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Originally published at Internet.com

Cars.com, the online auto shopping megasite, started off the year with a big project: A strategic business-IT alignment effort called CAM.

CAM, which stands for Cars Architecture Makeover, is a sweeping effort aiming to increase the reliability, agility and scalability of the company's web site - which is visited by more than 8 million users a month - to support an aggressive product roadmap.

For starters, the company envisions capabilities such as enabling RSS readers across the Internet to ping it for the latest listings, enhancing listings by making new values searchable as consumer demands change, and upgrading its class listing comparison tool.

Cars.com has publicly stated that this year it will more than double its product development budget, make a multimillion-dollar investment into new consumer site functionality, and further enhance its dealer products. All of which requires a much sounder and richer architecture to build off of than is currently in place.

"We have a long product roadmap with things we want to do with the consumer site, to go after opportunities and emerging segments, like diesel or hybrid," says Bill Swislow, a Cars.com veteran who in December took on the newly created post of senior vice president, product, to lead the site's product development strategy.

The company last year did its first major IT evaluation in a long time, and when the business and IT groups sat down to measure infrastructure against product plans, it was clear big changes were necessary to realize its goals.

"We basically have 10 years' worth of development, and some of these 10-year-old layers are still running," Swislow says. "So one of the big wins of this is we are going to clean house of disparate applications done at different times by different people."

Managing Data Transformation

Eliminating the overhead that comes with using many of these legacy applications is a key goal. Broadly speaking, much of the company's business turns on being able to take in and publish classified ads. Today there's no single, efficient platform for taking those feeds in from different suppliers and publishing out to partners.

"Let's say we have 100 inbound data sources built over the years individually. If one thing from one of those feeds should change, we have the inbound interface to change, as well as Cars' back-end interface," says CTO Manny Montejano. "If something in Cars' back-end needs to change, we've got the backend to change and now 100 interfaces outbound to change."

The company, which plans to leverage web services throughout its architecture, will use an IBM set of solutions running on an Oracle database that includes the Websphere Portal, Data Stage, and Websphere Process Server running on IBM pSeries hardware and the AIX operating system. The Data Stage tool will help the company to coherently manage data transformation in one spot.

"It quickly brings the value of web services' ability to lower our time to market and bring value to consumers, and lower operational maintenance costs," says Montejano.

Swislow credits Montejano, who arrived in September 2005, for being the person who looked under the covers at what was in place and suggesting the company step back and really consider what it needs to do, holistically, to achieve its goals.

"Preceding Manny's arrival, we had tried some fundamental architectural changes, and those projects were not entirely successful because we hadn't done enough analysis," he says. "We had tried a lighter-weight effort to address some of the problems we were well aware of, and hadn't succeeded."

There were no disasters, he says, but the company didn't see all the ROI it had expected.

At the same time, Montejano didn't want to move forward on the IT front without validating the business strategy and requirements.

"One thing I stressed to executive management before doing such a project was that upgrading of the architecture alone would do nothing but to put off our being in the same situation five to seven years from now," says Montejano, whose group is responsible for providing the back-end solutions for Cars.com. "So we talked about the root cause of how a technology organization gets in this situation, and that has nothing to do with the technology but rather how business and IT align and work together from soup to nuts."

That conversation - and the regular communications that take place now as the company phases in CAM over the next few years - has helped changed the dynamics between IT and the business. Today the groups are more tightly aligned, and the project plans are more transparent to each other.

Montejano credits the company's ability to have completed 30 major initiatives last year under the existing architecture to this new partnership. Among these initiatives were fraud-prevention products, a Google mini-appliance powered site search, and a new ad product that lets car dealers promote a select group of cars.

A Phased Approach

"Part of the reason we were able to roll out as many projects as we did last year on the current architecture is that, while the technology platform didn't change, the business project and the alignment did," Montejano says.

In addition to these efforts, the company has hired business experts on methodology, and now has a formal Project Management Office. The director of project management has opened up the visibility of IT projects and where they stand with regard to the rest of the organization, and the methodology he's injected into that business process has been so successful that it is being adopted across non-IT and cross-functional vertical groups, the executives say.

Cars is now working on the underlying data and data model phase of the CAM project, on which vehicle searches and partner-based feeds are based. The company says it is deliberately taking a phased approach to implementing CAM, rather than attempting to do one single massive overhaul.

"This keeps up the pressure to keep deploying on the existing platform but greatly reduces the risk of catastrophe," says Swislow. Benefits are already being realized, chief among them the fact that everyone now has a better understanding of what the current architecture looks like and the interdependencies within which, if they remained unknown, could easily trip things up. Changes have been made to back-end development so that it will be easier to migrate new functionality over once CAM is fully in place.

As the company masters its business and IT alignment strategy, collaboration and communication about potential problems or errors are front and center.

"We always had requirements cycles - business and functionality - and sometimes it worked better than others. Now we have consistent repeatable processes, so we don't see the kind of variability we used to," says Swislow.

That includes processes for managing problems - and that's letting him sleep better at night. "I'm highly confident that IT management is on top of any problem, understands it, and can respond more effectively," he says. "I don't fret as much."