Accelerating Digital Transformation in Industry with Drupal: Key Insights and Lessons Learned

Share your case studies at the DrupalCon Europe 2024 Client & Industry track

In today's dynamic digital environment, businesses constantly seek innovative strategies to maintain their competitive edge. A pivotal force in this endeavour is digital transformation, where organisations harness technology to drive innovation, streamline operations, and foster meaningful customer interactions.

Drupal, an open-source content management system (CMS), is an ideal platform to achieve these objectives.

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Photo by Jean-Paul Vosmeer

Drupal is not only a premier enterprise-level CMS but also a comprehensive digital experience platform renowned for its reliability, interoperability, scalability, security, and ease of customization and integration. Positioned as a forefront technology, Drupal seamlessly caters to sophisticated website needs while offering organizational agility across various industry domains.

With over 1.6 million active sites, Drupal boasts a diverse user base ranging from small enterprises to large corporations and governmental bodies. Notable adopters include esteemed entities like the US government, the Australian government, NBC, Harvard University, Lenovo, Pfizer, Unesco, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, University of California, and Udemy, among numerous others.


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Photo by Gábor Hojtsy

Drupal is a flexible and powerful platform that can be customized to meet the specific needs of different organizations. Some common use cases for digital transformation with Drupal include
 

1. E-commerce: Drupal can build highly scalable and customizable e-commerce sites. With the ability to integrate with a range of payment gateways and shipping providers and support for complex product catalogues and pricing structures, Drupal is an excellent platform for building e-commerce sites that can grow and evolve with your business.
    
2. Marketing: Drupal's flexibility and scalability make it an ideal platform for building marketing sites that can support a range of campaigns and initiatives. With support for multilingual content, powerful SEO tools, and the ability to integrate with various marketing automation platforms, Drupal can help you deliver highly personalized and targeted marketing experiences.
    
3. Collaboration: Drupal's built-in collaboration tools, such as user roles and permissions, content workflows, and revision history, make it an ideal platform for building intranets and other collaborative sites. With the ability to customize these tools to meet your organization's unique needs, Drupal can help you improve communication and collaboration across your team.
    
4. Government: Drupal is widely used in the public sector thanks to its strong security track record and flexibility. Government agencies can use Drupal to build complex websites that meet citizens' needs while also ensuring compliance with relevant regulations and standards.
    
5. Nonprofits: Drupal's open-source nature and the large community of developers make it an ideal platform for nonprofits with limited budgets. With the ability to build robust, customized websites that support fundraising, advocacy, and other initiatives, Drupal can help nonprofits achieve their goals more effectively.

Another advantage of open source is the people behind the software, a community of more than 1.5+ million members of developers, designers, and users who are passionate about the platform. By engaging with this community, you can tap into a wealth of knowledge and expertise, connect and share best practices and lessons learned for managing large complex projects and pushing innovative boundaries using Drupal. 

One great place to share and connect is at the upcoming Drupal conference in Europe, DrupalCon Barcelona, held on 24-27 September. In the Client & Industry track, we provide a platform to share case studies and experiences by representatives of organizations specialized in choosing the tools that promote their digital transformation. And it’s not only techs speaking, but also CMOs, CTOs, digital managers, agencies, and business/site owners using Drupal strategically. The key goal is to show how Drupal can adapt to fit projects of all shapes and sizes, across all industries.


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Photo by DrupalCon Lille 2023

The sessions are targeted to digital managers and executive decision-makers using Drupal or considering the solution as their next content and digital experience management platform. Agency leaders, product owners, and tech leads can also benefit from the showcases in this track.

The showcases will add more business value if told by project owners from the companies themselves, or with the agencies alongside their clients. By sharing your journey using Drupal in your digital transformation, you will help existing and potential Drupal users (clients) learn innovative ways to improve Drupal, from Drupal users themselves.

The Client & Industry track typically covers the following areas:

• Digital Transformation
• Drupal Digital Experiences
• Media & Publishing
• E-commerce
• Government
• Education & Non-Profit Organizations
• Community Platforms
• General Open Web

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Photo by Gábor Hojtsy

What can you showcase?

Here are some examples of what you can share through your case studies about your experiences with Drupal:

• How you achieved agility, standardization, masterization, or implementation of new governance processes for Drupal projects that promote digital transformation and innovation within an organization
• How you implemented innovative customizations or how you use Drupal in conjunction with other solutions.
• How the unique capabilities and features of Drupal make it a one-stop solution for enterprises.
• How Drupal serves as the foundation and stepping stone for building an integrated Commerce, Marketing, CRM, and ERP platform and delivering integrability, flexibility, and scalability at a reasonable cost.
• Showcase reuse, cost savings, productivity efficiencies, and innovative customizations in organizational structures.
• How Drupal has been extended to support multifaceted institutions and empower disparate and fragmented editorial teams.
• How Drupal is used to build engaging and intuitive community platforms.
• How we can continue to support our ability to access and publish on the open web and allow engaging and meaningful digital experiences.
• How you have integrated sustainability in your Drupal ecosystem or used Drupal to create sites and channels to promote or track an organization’s sustainability 
• How you are using machine learning and artificial intelligence in your Drupal platforms

We have listed some presentation topics above, but are open to new themes for the track. What has been your experience with implementing Drupal in your organization in the last few years? What types of governance processes have been put in place? What have been your successes and challenges? What have you learned, and what do you wish you knew before you started?

We’d love to hear about it! Send us your case study for the Client & Industry track and share it with the Drupal community. 

Not sure if your topic is right here? Don’t be afraid to choose the wrong track as all track chairs are in close contact and will consider moving your session to the best place.

How to make your pitch and presentation successful

When thinking about what to present, and writing up your pitch, keep these tips in mind:

• Showcase an experience that can be relevant to others in a similar situation. We want to see your insights and lessons learned.
• Focus more on the HOW, and not WHAT IT IS.
• Make a few key points and focus on those.
• Keep the target audience in mind for this track.
• Focus on business value.

What to avoid:

Don´t present a bunch of facts or data that can easily be found on the internet.

• Avoid slides with a massive amount of text.
• Don´t focus on the tools so much as the processes
• Avoid heavy technical topics. You can introduce technology, but don't deep dive into technical presentations.

Target Audience

The sessions target digital managers and executive decision-makers who use Drupal or are considering using it as their next digital experience management platform. Agency leaders, product owners, and tech leads can also take advantage of the sessions & workshops on this track.


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Photo by Bram Driesen

Why Participate?

Because you will be able to:

Tell Your Story
DrupalCon offers everyone a platform to showcase the best of your work. We want to know how you fostered innovation using Drupal for building community platforms, improving editorial experiences, creating eCommerce platforms, and delivering meaningful user experiences.

Give Back to the Community
DrupalCon is an event for anyone who wants to learn Drupal to make a difference in others’ lives. It doesn’t matter whether you are a developer, designer, editor, or an end-user even. Simply put your ideas to work at contribution events and enjoy learning and being a part of one of the largest open-source communities in the world.

Submit your sessions now and help create the best program for DrupalCon Barcelona 2024!

Contact: Antonella Severo, antonellasevero, Track Chair Lead, Clients & Industry

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Photo by DrupalCon Lille 2023

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