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Rio Tinto Case Study PDF

It is rather apt that Rio Tinto, a company whose history begins in an ancient Spanish mine named after a local red river, should choose to meet the challenge of global business communications in the 21st century with technology from a company called Open Text.

Rio Tinto has grown enormously since smart investors purchased a local mine in southern Spain in 1873 and turned it into a profitable business. Today, Rio Tinto is one of the world’s largest mining and exploration companies, mining and processing metals and minerals that include aluminium, copper, iron ore, diamonds, coal, uranium, gold and industrial minerals.

In the natural pursuit of mineral deposits, Rio Tinto has operations in more than 50 countries. In 2008, the company employed around 65,000 people. Revenue for 2007 was more than $30 billion.

Over the years, Rio Tinto has grown significantly, often through mergers and strategic partnerships. For a major global business, this created significant challenges in communicating a consistent brand and sending coherent messages to its many stakeholders – including investors, customers, suppliers, employees and the media.

To address this challenge, Rio Tinto has replaced many of its locally-managed websites with a dynamic, consistent and professional global cascade of web presence, centrally managed by a corporate team of just two people, supported by web editors in the local businesses.

“We used Open Text to engineer a high quality, worldwide web presence that requires minimal resources but has the flexibility to combine a consistent corporate image with local content generation. All within a secure, low-cost and easily managed environment,” says Bryan Smith, Principal adviser, digital media in Rio Tinto’s Corporate Communications function.

Evaluating alternatives
Rio Tinto had over 80 separate websites created and run by separate divisions and individual mines around the world. Overall there was a lack of clarity and governance over Rio Tinto’s worldwide web presence.

There were a wide variety of approaches to content management. Some locations didn’t have any system, some had written a home-grown facility and there were a host of different systems sourced locally, each with its own contract and commercial arrangements. This led to a degree of inefficiency and challenges in governance.

To address these issues, Bryan Smith set out a clear strategy to transform Rio Tinto’s global web communications. The strategy focused on building a central hub of web templates - created, populated and managed centrally, but tagged for dissemination through the various Rio Tinto web domains around the world.

Rio Tinto appointed Rufus Leonard to handle the technical build of the web infrastructure and work with a creative agency, View, on a new web design. In addition to implementing a consistent and professional presentation for Rio Tinto around the world, a key requirement was for local operations to be able to add their own content within certain page frames whilst adhering to the global design and presentation standards.

“We conducted a thorough review of all the most appropriate web content management systems. Our evaluations revealed Open Text as being clearly the best for our purposes in terms of cost, governance, platforms and outcomes,” Bryan Smith explained. “We wanted a cost effective solution from a responsible global organisation which could be trusted to deliver. We steered away from open source solutions or products that were restricted to only a small number of high-profile, high-cost consultancy implementers.”

“Open Text Web Solutions is based on Microsoft .net which gives us the important benefit of being able to develop our own applications and plug them into the global web cascade,” Smith added. “Open Text Web Solutions also allows us to run multiple websites from the core software hub, in multiple languages, and populating multiple domains. This is vital to us as a major, multi-product, global business.”

Security and Control
The range of businesses and mining activities within Rio Tinto’s global business is vast, and each requires to publish information specific to its particular products and markets. 
 
It was essential that beneath a consistent corporate image and presentation, each local website should have the ability to populate pages with locally-generated content.

Rio Tinto achieved this by developing a multi-tiered template infrastructure of web pages. At the top level, corporate pages contain no flexibility to change content, or restrict local content to specific frames within the page. However, further down the hierarchy, flexible frameworks are provided that allow local editors to load content that relates specifically to the local business.

This means that a local operation sees that it has ownership of its own web domain, but the entire worldwide structure adheres to the professional corporate standards for quality and design. Local editors are not permitted to breach defined boundaries when pursuing their own creative urges to add local content.

Rapid Re-branding
A major advantage of creating and storing web pages within a central hub is that Rio Tinto retains control over its web presence from a single point. Not only do Bryan Smith and his team know what is being displayed on the web in places as far afield as Brisbane and Yellowknife, Canada, they are also able to change the content, image and presentation extremely rapidly and have changes implemented instantaneously throughout the world.

Rio Tinto recently undertook a corporate rebranding which needed to be reflected across its worldwide web presence. “We simply modified templates in the central hub and were able to reflect the new brand across Rio Tinto web domains across the world. The exercise was particularly cost effective,” Bryan Smith enthused. “Previously, such a project would have taken many months.”

Minute Web Management Team
Despite the scope and scale of Rio Tinto’s business operations, the company’s London headquarters employs only two full time people dedicated to governing the company’s entire global web presence.

In addition to normal text and images, the Open Text solution enables Rio Tinto to centrally load more sophisticated content, including external data feeds and video presentations, which are then transmitted to the world-wide domain sites.

The template pages in the central hub are tagged to target downloads to appropriate divisions and countries. Not all the global websites carry the same content, and flexible templates with blank frames are provided within the Open Text Content Management System (CMS) for local content uploads.

“Local staff find it very easy using Open Text Web Solutions to upload content to the page templates, and there is no requirement for them to worry about page design or presentation,” Bryan Smith added. “We have found it easy to train people. Open Text Web Solutions is an excellent tool for letting people with little expertise produce good quality web pages.”

Rapid New Site Build
Rio Tinto frequently takes on new businesses that need to be brought into the corporate fold. The most recent example was the acquisition of Canadian aluminium producer, Alcan Inc., which made Rio Tinto a global leader in the aluminium industry.

Using Open Text’s technology, the web team in London created a brand new Rio Tinto Alcan web site, incorporating the style and layout of the parent company.

Ongoing support/maintenance
Rufus Leonard is a premium partner of Open Text. It managed the development and implementation project, working with View, the creative design agency. Supporting implementation in Rio Tinto’s locations across the world, Rufus Leonard introduced a 24 hour job ticketing system, which facilitated highly efficient ‘follow-the-sun’ training and technical support.

All the code for Rio Tinto’s web sites is held centrally. This means that when enhancements are suggested by one area of the business, they are implemented centrally and rolled out automatically so that every other part of the company enjoys the same immediate benefits.

Impressive Results
From humble beginnings as a collection of over 80 individually managed websites, Rio Tinto is transforming its web presence into a consistent, professional and highly-effective global communications medium that meets both corporate and local needs.

Unusual for a global engagement of this scale and complexity, the whole project was delivered on time and within budget.

“We have completed a successful large-enterprise web project that meets our corporate objectives at low cost to develop and very low cost to maintain,” Bryan Smith concludes. “Open Text played an essential role in what we have achieved. The beauty of what we have, going forward, is control over our global web presence, intrinsic scalability and an easy ability to deal with both change in our business and the adoption of new generations of web communication as they evolve.”