What can a major sports team's IT teach the corporate CIO?

Feway Park. Photo from Wikipedia

Yesterday I sat in on the final keynote session of the Boston e2 Conference to hear from the IT leaders of major sports teams about their experiences using IT to support such unusual businesses. And the information they provided turned out to be hugely valuable for more traditional companies too. 

The stars of the show were:

* Bill Schlough, CIO, San Francisco Giants
* Jay Wessel, VP of Technology, Boston Celtics
* Steve Conley, Director of IT, Boston Red Sox

Boston considers itself a serious sporting city, and is intensely proud of all of its top-tier teams, so to add sport into the enterprise software conference is always going to be interesting for the audience. And despite the expected rivalry, the insights all of the tech leaders presented were quite thought-provoking.

Really though, what can a corporate CIO possibly learn from these guys? After all, the largest IT team among any of the presenters is 11 people at the Giants. And maybe that is the biggest point: all of these teams have deadlines that can’t be moved (the new season opens, the next game is scheduled), they have an ever changing temporary worker base of thousands, so they all have to think ‘lean’ to get things done. No pressure then.

Forgetting the team rivalries, what were the memorable points a corporate CIO can learn from?

“Don’t  be a server-hugger”

For a lean IT team, your VP of IT can’t be too attached to the actual physical servers. The cloud for custom hosting and more importantly SaaS products that already package the functionality you need to run your business are essential. IT egos can’t be attached to the actual physical boxes, since managing those things just kills time. Applications just can’t be developed in house, so use what is available commercially and can be customized to suit your needs.

“Good job, the email server was up today”

This is not something any IT team hears. The daily grunge of operating important IT infrastructure doesn’t win anybody awards. Outsource this kind of commodity function to any of the big players who can do it better than you, probably at lower cost. This allows you to really focus on your critical services, such as ticketing, and front line customer systems.

“Demand-based pricing - or doing anything radically different”

Freeing up resources lets you look at transformational projects, enabling your IT team to really help the business. By getting data to support decisions, and managing external resources to trial new ways of working, the Giants were able to roll out a new demand-based pricing model for tickets. Much like buying a flight, nowadays ‘last minute’ doesn't mean cheaper. If you can commit to a ticket in the stadium early on when demand is low, you get a better price. As demand rises and space becomes limited, ticket prices rise, steeply. Since the major share of revenue for all these teams is supporters in seats, getting this right can have a huge up-side, or a terrible impact.

For this to work, the IT team needs to have the capacity and capability to look at the bigger picture. To look at how the current ticket sales systems work, what can be adapted and what needs to be replaced. They need to be able to analyze the current state, and model the future. IT needs a business head on its shoulders to operate in this environment. And it definitely needs to acknowledge that external advice and experience is going to be needed.

“Loyalty data is not Big Data”

If you have a loyal customer base like teams have with season ticket holders, and a city full of people wanting to watch a game, knowing your customer is essential. But outdated, paper-based, in-house systems can’t do what you need in this regard. At the same time, there is no need to fall into the trap of building out a huge Big Data facility to understand your customers. First, you actually have to get hold of information that can get you the insights you hope for.

Can you imagine that at least one of these major teams has only recently moved from paper tickets for season pass holders to a smart card? What does the smart card get you, beyond saving a tree or two? Well, once you have that central ‘identity’, you can use it to track purchases of beer, snacks and ice-cream at games. You can watch attendance at games. You can collect information that you never had before in order to understand how to attract new season ticket sales in future, and to reward and retain your existing customers. This isn’t a big data problem. It is just a “get the data” problem, and fixing up old ways of working can help you do that.

“If sporting performance has peaked, how do we retain and attract supporters in the future?”

Not every team wins the cup every season. Not every company releases new, stunning products every year. How can IT support the business when the primary product starts to lose some of its sparkle? Customers are fickle and have a short attention span. Fair-weather sports fans especially so.

Again, it comes down to having the time, the vision, and the right people to allow you to focus on keeping current customers happy, and making the experience of being at a major sporting event even more exciting. It has to be incredibly better than watching an HDTV in the comfort of your home. IT can provide fans with facilities such as free wi-fi, allowing tens of thousands of people to remain connected, to Tweet, to share photos of their experiences. And to feel like they are connected to the players who are the face of the team. It can enable more interesting online community experiences, and work with Marketing to keep people involved outside of the stadium. IT can help streamline business processes so the business can adapt more easily to customer demands and expectations ensuring that the nitty-gritty doesn’t get in the way of the experience.

The end game

The sports team CIO is really a model for how a CIO in any corporation that takes customer loyalty and experience seriously (not just lip service) should consider operating. Think:

• identifying technology that can enable an exceptional customer experience
• getting and using data smartly to understand your customer better
• letting go of the physical servers and outdated business processes to allow transformational projects to be considered

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Big Data - and what we'll do with it

The Gartner Hype Cycle

Big Data: it is all just hype until the clouds clear, business users can use it, and customers are served better because of it. When Big Data truly arrives as some products in the enterprise, business decisions will start to be based more on information and insight and less on gut feel (by the highest paid person who trumps everybody else). While we are waiting for the final crescendo of hype, I’d like to consider what we are going to do with all that new information.

Most rational people quietly accept that Big Data is mostly hype right now. Everybody is trying to stake a claim to their chunk of it and the chatter on social channels as marketers try to nurture the term into a real market is a source of big data in itself. The concept only starts being real as forward thinking CIOs focus less on the mundane IT networks and PCs and more on helping the business extract value from all the data they have access to using the tools borne of the hype. That is Big Data - the real use of analyzed data to help make business decisions, not just the technology hype about who has the best Hadoop or in memory database. Don’t know what these terms mean? You are a member of 99.999% of the business population, AKA normal people. Because you shouldn't have to know.

We are still in the early phase of the technology cycle for Big Data. The IBMs, SAPs and HPs of the world are still appealing to very early adopters who have money to burn on acronymic technologies that have yet to be formed into meaningful products with advertising friendly names. By 'meaningful', I want to imply that only a small team of consultants are required to install them and make them do something that regular business users and executives can make use of.

Currently most of the focus of the hype and actual product releases seems to be on the storage, manipulation, analysis and visualization of the data. I've seen little meaningful discussion about what I consider key problems:

• making information actionable
• taking business decisions from a concept through actual change
• providing communication and business records without generating a ton of irrelevant email and wasted report writing along the way

This is where business process management (BPM), customer relationship management (CRM), and case management tools come into play. But not as the tech vendors might have you believe. The value is not purely from the extra data they pump into the system from day-to-day management of customer interactions and employee collaboration.

Of course, having a good insight into your customers and business activities is great. Being able to manage the flood of required decisions coming from future Big Data analysis is equally important. How do you actively handle all the business information coming out of the business? Losing it in email is not the answer. Never actually following up with your newly revealed best customers is just a waste.

Handling the flood of new work emanating from real Big Data analysis should not be yet another chore. This is going to be valuable stuff we never had access to before. Managing the work actively through flexible processes, using tools designed to help people follow up on decisions that need to be made, this is a key component of Big Data. Its not currently the sexy part (for geeks at least). But it is the final component that ensures that all the investment in technology, analysis and experience is not just lost into meaningless email conversations that go nowhere.

Speaking of conversations going nowhere... follow me @consected on Twitter

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

I am a client, not a case folder

Over on Redux, Tom Shepherd talks about Case Management, and how the WfMC (Workflow Management Coalition for people outside the industry) is attempting to put some relevant thoughts around the non-workflow aspects of business processes. There have been many attempts at defining what Case Management is, and I don't care to write yet another one - I've blogged enough times before and frankly nobody cared then either!.

An important point for case management is the case folder. Okay, so this is the core differentiation of the product that Tom manages, and what allows it to call itself a case mysanagement product, rather than an imaging and workflow (document-centric BPM, in industry lingo) product. Its a great product - from a consulting side, I managed the implementation of an insurance underwriting and policy management solution based on it in under three months with just a few pains and late nights along the way. But aside from the product, is the case folder concept really anything special?

The problem for all product vendors is that they need a name for each feature of their product. Especially with business process management, the business problems that you can solve with a product are often so broad and unrelated that trying to give a piece of functionality a name that is meaningful to a business person just pigeon-holes it into one industry. That is the problem with the case folder - it is meaningless to a business person, but its virtually impossible to find a name that is more useful.

I've seen case folder concepts from multiple software vendors - hell, Consected has its own take on the concept (though it borrows none of the intellectual property from Tom's product, or the Tower/Vignette/OpenText product I worked with previously, before random corporate organizations with no better way of generating income start trying to make my life miserable). The approach I take though is this: to assume nothing about the case folder up front, beyond the fact that it is a way of representing business information or entities (a client, an insurance claim, a 'know your customer' (KYC) bank application review, an invoice, an employee, an account, a securities trade). A 'case folder' may or may not have structured database-style information. It may or may not have documents associated with it. It may or may not capture comments or discussions from users. It may or may not sit inside or contain workflows. It may or may not have checkbox tasks, deadlines or whatever. It may or may not be related to other business entities.

Most businesses don't get what a case folder is. Trying to beat them over the head to understand the term, just to make it easier for vendors to sell them software is not really the best approach (in my opinion). If we sell solutions, we conveniently forget the functionality and buzzwords of our software, and instead pick up the needs and buzzwords of the industry we are working with.

So, I agree that information, processes and 'case folders' must work together sometimes, standalone sometime, and not exist at all many times. The name and the functionality of a particular vendor's manila folder approach to organizing information does not interest me or the business I'm working with. As a business user, what matters to me is the 'something' I'm working with. Businesses benefit from focusing on their customers, as much as software vendors do, and helping them do that by putting a 'client' not a 'case folder' in front of users is a huge benefit in a solution.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com