The unified estate: Orchestrating design, data, and strategy at Empire Life, Luke Woolliscroft
Summary
Luke Woolliscroft, Director of IT Digital Customer & Advisor Experience at Empire Life, presented on transforming the company's fragmented digital ecosystem into a unified estate. Empire Life, a Canadian life insurance and financial services company, faced challenges with multiple isolated websites, apps, and platforms that created inconsistent brand experiences and disjointed user journeys. Woolliscroft outlined a three-pillar strategy to address these issues while maintaining strict compliance, security, and accessibility requirements mandated by the regulated insurance industry.
The first pillar focuses on standardizing visual surfaces through a component-driven design system that bridges Drupal 10, Drupal 11, and non-Drupal applications. A key example is implementing a unified visual header across all platforms to anchor users to a single Empire Life experience. The second pillar involves 'unifying the invisible' infrastructure, including standardizing AODA compliance at the component level and restructuring analytics from 20+ disparate Google Tag Manager instances into a unified cross-domain tracking system that enables complete user journey visibility.
The third pillar addresses future readiness through AI optimization, moving beyond traditional SEO to structure data for LLM consumption using JSON schema markup. This includes treating English and French as distinct entities rather than mere translations. Woolliscroft emphasized the importance of decoupling infrastructure from application layers to enable zero-downtime deployments and migrations.
He highlighted that people often engage with life insurance companies during difficult times, requiring compassionate and seamless user experiences. The transformation maintains existing systems while building new unified layers on top, ensuring business continuity during the transition.
Key Takeaways
- •Govern components, not pages - implementing a standardized design system accelerates time-to-market and ensures AODA compliance is built-in from the start
- •Standardize invisible infrastructure layers - consolidating 20+ Google Tag Manager instances into unified cross-domain tracking enables complete user journey visibility
- •Structure data for machines while designing experiences for humans - use JSON schema markup to optimize for AI/LLM consumption without sacrificing user experience
- •Decouple infrastructure from application layers to enable zero-downtime migrations and deployments
- •Treat multilingual content as distinct entities rather than translations to ensure precise AI routing and culturally appropriate experiences
- •Build unified layers on top of existing systems rather than disrupting current operations during digital transformation
- •Focus AI optimization initially on highly structured content like FAQs and product details before tackling edge cases
- •Break down organizational silos through cross-team collaboration and shared governance standards
- •Use visual audits to demonstrate the business impact of fragmented digital experiences
- •Remember that insurance customers often engage during stressful life events, requiring compassionate and seamless experiences
- •Enable decentralized content authoring to allow translation teams to manage content directly through Drupal
- •Implement unified visual headers as anchoring elements to maintain brand consistency across different technology stacks
Transcript
Good afternoon everyone. Our first afternoon session. Um so my name's Arnav if you don't know me. I'm with evolving web. So welcome to all of you and uh the first talk I've been in with without AI in the title. Um so that's that's refreshing. Um so I'd like to introduce Luke uh who has a new job title at Empire Life where he's been for 17 years which is pretty crazy. >> He's director IT but also of digital customer and advisor journey. So I thought I've never seen a job title like that at any of...
