IntechOpen

The challenge

IntechOpen's development effort was spread across a small team working on multiple interconnected systems - but the team itself wasn't structured to match that reality. There was no consistent communication channel, no shared space for surfacing decisions or blockers, and no deliberate way to spread knowledge between developers working on different parts of the stack.

The systems themselves were already talking to each other - data and workflows moved between them - but not in an optimal way, and there was no single source of truth. Business data and logic were scattered across systems depending on who had built what and when, making it hard to know which system to trust for a given answer.

The solution

The first change was organizational, not technical: unifying developers who'd been working in isolation on their own systems into one core team, with a proper communication channel and a shared space for knowledge - decisions, context, and lessons learned stopped living only in individual developers' heads.

On the systems side, defining a clear technical architecture came first: Salesforce CRM was established as the single source of truth for business data and process, consolidating logic that had previously been duplicated or scattered across systems. The public-facing website kept its role as the open front door - important for an open-access publisher where public visibility matters - but its core dependencies now point back to the CRM instead of maintaining a parallel version of the truth. Alongside the restructuring, technology costs were reviewed and optimized as part of the same effort.

Key features

• Unified previously siloed developers into one core development team
• Established a shared communication channel and knowledge-sharing space
• Defined the technical architecture for how systems integrate and share data
• Consolidated business data and logic around Salesforce CRM as the single source of truth
• Kept the public website as the open, public-facing front for an open-access publisher
• Reviewed and optimized technology costs across systems

Outcome

The team now shares a single communication channel and a common source of truth, instead of each system holding its own version of the data. Cross-system work is easier to reason about and coordinate, knowledge no longer sits with just one person, and the public website keeps serving as an open front end without duplicating the business logic that now lives in the CRM.