AEMO

Key outcomes

• Clear identification of issues in the current DXP implementation.
• Practical assessment of Headless, Composable and SaaS options for AEMO.
• Immediate savings through key operating model changes.
• Potential to save over $1 million in operating costs over four years.
• Nine actionable recommendations to improve performance and customer experience.
• Recommendation to defer migration to a Headless platform until 2027.

Overview

LuminateCX partnered with the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to address several CX, website and content management challenges. Like many Sitecore customers in 2024, the decision to upgrade, modernise or migrate to another provider is a very real issue. Whilst we believe the issue is not specific to Sitecore, there is a drive from senior technology leaders to make smart, cost-effective decisions that balance the needs of the organisation, their employees and most importantly, their customers.

After reaching out to LuminateCX and through our initial Spark engagement (a 90-minute meeting), it was clear that AEMO could be overspending on their DXP tech, struggling to maintain their high SLA requirements (AEMO is a Critical Infrastructure organisation), and stressing their teams and agency providers through the limitations in their DXP and Hosting provider arrangements. Whilst the decisions made years ago were sound decisions at the time, the DXP and WebOps world is changing, and it was clear AEMO wanted to harness these modern approaches, cost-effectively, with zero disruption to the market.

LuminateCX delivered our expertise in digital transformation and customer experience to assess the platform and provide recommendations that balanced cost reduction and modernisation.

The Challenge

Once the Spark meeting was complete, we got stuck into our Ignite program. Ignite takes the client on a journey to uncover the business strategy, the customer, marketing and technology approach, and identifies key issues that we can see are stopping them from being successful. In AEMO's case, the inefficiencies with the Sitecore-powered website and CMS, were leading to overspending on Azure and overall poor infrastructure performance. This subsequently led to the team, and their agency fighting table-stakes issues on a regular basis, and diverting attention away from modernisation and proactive Customer Experience improvements. All in all, this is a common story for mid-size and enterprise DXP clients of Sitecore, Adobe, Epi/Optimizely.

The major challenges we agreed on were;

• Critical Infrastructure SLAs were not being met cost-effectively.
• Team members with adjacent skillsets (developers) being required to troubleshoot application and infrastructure issues.
• An over-reliance on poor vendor documentation and guidance led to an ineffective architecture.
• Perceived licencing challenges also led to a misalignment in architecture decisions.
• Lack of working High Availability/Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) capability.
• An unsupported Sitecore version with potentially high upgrade costs.
• Poor original implementation of Sitecore SXA with some existing tech debt (largely fixed by new agency team)
• Lack of maintenance of content, media items, layouts and templates (a common story with all CMSs).
• Multiple websites with deviations in architecture leading to lack of reuse.
• Poor front-end search implementation due to reliance on Apache Solr (a common issue for many customers)
• Poor clarity from vendor and market on Headless transition options, approach and costs.
• No immediate business benefit from migrating to Headless or SaaS CMS options, whether Sitecore or otherwise.

Additionally, AEMO, down to the nature of its customer/stakeholder base, is early on its journey to implement strong marketing performance metrics and tracking, to truly understand user journeys and customer impact of the website, largely due to their limited resources and funds being used to fight the issues above.

The Solution

LuminateCX recommended a balanced solution of modernisation and cost control.

• We discussed and documented all key business issues, prioritising those that should, could and must be solved.
• We wrote new requirements for the organisation that spanned technologies, processes and people.
  • This included a top-down business analysis of the Headless, SaaS and Composable trends.
  • Detailed budgeting including licencing, hosting, upgrade, support, FTE and existing software.
• We engaged selected vendors in the market that we believed could meet the needs of the requirements.
  • Including the incumbent, Sitecore, and selected modern headless vendors.
  • We evaluated the decision between upgrade, modernisation or migration.
• The recommendation
  • The business had no demonstrable reason to migrate to a headless architecture, and the cost alone was too high.
  • At LuminateCX we recommend that a headless migration for an organisation like AEMO is best when;
    • You have a need to completely rebrand, redesign or change your overall website CX.
    • You are aligning your marketing website approach with your technology implementations.
    • You can chart a cost-effective, zero-disruption migration.
    • You can see significant, demonstrable post-migration benefits.
    • Otherwise, the current approach is completely fit-for-purpose for AEMO's needs.
  • We recommended these major changes to meet the needs of the business:
    • Change DevOps and 24x7 Support from internal teams and agency, through a modern outsource arrangement.
    • Upgrade to the latest version of Sitecore 10.4 and downgrade to XM Edition.
    • Clean up content, media and page items to deliver a cleaner author and website visitor experience.
    • Adopt a modern SaaS-based, Composable search tool, reducing dependency on Solr.
    • Modern analytics and performance tracking, including better integration with Google Analytics 4 and a robust customer experience metric framework.
    • 4 other CX improvements were recommended and could be funded from savings identified.

In summary, the AEMO digital team were in a great place. With a small capable, well-trained team, they were delivering their CX to market and meeting the goals of the organisation, but it wasn't as easy as it could be, and a better, more cost-effective way that creates certainty for the next 4 years has been agreed on collaboratively.

Results

The new AEMO roadmap could save AEMO over $1.02 million over four years. This includes improved content management workflows, reduced reliance on outdated technology, and a more secure, scalable infrastructure. Additionally, the proposed customer experience improvements will boost website usability, making content more accessible and future-proofing the platform.

“LuminateCX brought a professional approach, with a clear plan and methodology, which was a differentiator. Their independence in providing advice was evident. We felt assured that we had the ‘A team’ handling our engagement, particularly in technology, auditing, and user analysis.” - Woody Lo, AEMO

Conclusion

The engagement with AEMO highlights the value of LuminateCX’s independent, methodical approach to digital optimisation and transformation.

By focusing on both immediate technology fixes and long-term process enhancements, LuminateCX delivered a roadmap that improves both cost efficiency and digital performance, while positioning AEMO for future success. LuminateCX’s expertise in auditing, process optimisation and customer experience design provided AEMO with a strategic, sustainable path to modernisation.