Digitizing operations: How to measure the digital readiness of your sports business

Building an end-to-end digital strategy identifies both the challenges an organization faces and its opportunities to digitize. This is often the first step towards deciding how digital transformation will impact the business and has proven effective for sport’s leading innovators, some of whom are now taking their own digital solutions to market. 

Despite reluctance in other quarters, choosing to digitize the way your workforce operates isn’t different from the business targets CEOs set out before the digital era. The hope remains to bring harmony to the place (or indeed places) where your employees work and align their day-to-day activities with the wider corporate objectives.

In the business of sport, there are multiple avenues one can take on their digital transformation journey, including opportunities to improve performance and reduce costs – on and off the field of play. In the direct-to-consumer (D2C) age, streaming media, for example, is setting new precedents for the rights holder and the fan. 

According to Nielsen, sports properties continue to significantly increase engagement via social-video platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, while the continued integration of over-the-top (OTT) platforms into the broadcast space means sports properties are taking a more “diverse approach” to engaging new and younger audiences via digital.

Nevertheless, as sports organizations seek to broaden their owned digital inventory and capitalize on first-party data to personalize the fan experience, many identify holes in their internal infrastructure, where a lack of innovation undermines business performance.

A holistic approach is required to fully understand the digital and technological maturity of a business. Only then will you be able to explore all the options to innovate that are available to the company and to develop an extensive roadmap for transformation. 

This was the approach we took when a National Olympic Committee (NOC) commissioned our team at N3XT Sports to accelerate its digital transformation in the build up to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Summer Games.

As part of a thorough “digital and innovation assessment”, we carried out in-depth interviews with key staff throughout the NOC, including digital, marketing, and ticketing personnel, as well as IT technicians; reviewed all documentation related to the organization’s data and digital inventories; and helped set benchmarks for next steps within their innovation framework and digital strategy.

A digital readiness assessment is an important first step because it allows the organization to fully appreciate its existing operational framework, including how data flows through the organization and where they are sourced. As outlined at the top of the article, this helps determine how existing tools and services interact and, importantly, where the organization can make improvements to its digital capabilities.

In building a business case for digital transformation, an objective, 360° review of the organization’s digital readiness and IT maturity assesses the overall expenditure and revenue streams associated to each department. These include the running and maintenance cost of existing infrastructure and how it fits in with the organization’s future digital and data architecture. 

This extends to how the adoption of digital solutions, as part of the innovation framework, can improve operational performance to reduce time and money wasted on inefficient processes and decrease outgoing spend on third-party contractors and vendors for activities that could be brought in-house with the right mix of training and technologies.

In order to optimize internal processes across all departments, a digital transformation framework not only establishes which operations are outdated or obsolete, but also the solutions that will help improve business performance while reducing the costs attributed to the current business model. 

Sports organizations are multi-faceted, meaning that digital transformation shouldn’t aim to support individual departments or silo services, but the property’s entire digital ecosystem, including but not limited to the administrative processes carried out inside the front office; how the company engages consumers; and the performance of its athletes.

• Administrative – or operational – processes refer to the internal tasks that form part of the management and running of an entire business – from human resources and accounting to marketing and communications. With the adoption of a new, digital-focused framework, a company can replace manual and traditionally paper-based processes with artificial-intelligence (AI) solutions that increase workflow efficiencies and collect data which helps personnel better understand cost-drivers inside the business and potential revenue opportunities.
• Performance indicators are often subjective within organizations that lack the infrastructure to accurately measure productivity. For a sports entity, the performance of its teams and athletes is traditionally separated from its front-office operations. However, where centralized athlete-data tools help optimize player management and reduce their risk of injury and fatigue, team/athlete performance can also be aligned with the entity’s corporate objectives, including efforts to drive fan engagement on the back of their success and to attract new sponsorship opportunities.  

Ahead of Tokyo 2020, TOP partner Intel – the US technology company – launched a unique 3D Athlete Tracking (3DAT) platform to support athletes during their preparation for the event. As well as a coaching tool, athlete data captured by 3DAT, in collaboration with Olympic Broadcast Services (OBS) and Alibaba Cloud, were also used to enhance the broadcast experience during the Games, namely non-live content from Tokyo 2020’s sprint events. 

At the time of the announcement, Rick Echevarria, general manager of Intel’s Olympics Program, said: “Intel is focused on delivering world-class technology integrations at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to improve the experience for athletes, attendees, viewers, and Games staff while also demonstrating how technology can transform businesses.”

N3XT Sports has launched a Digital Assessment Tool (DAT) that adopts a quick and easy self-evaluation of the organization’s “digital readiness” and what its immediate focus should be. Our team of experts work with a diverse portfolio of teams, leagues, and federations at different stages of their own digital transformations to develop an innovation framework and digital strategy tailored to the IT maturity of their organization and its wider corporate objectives.

By understanding how digitalization can increase operational efficiency and reduce costs associated with outdated workflows, sports organizations will become better prepared for their own digital transformation. Furthermore, education reduces their reluctance to undertake a digital and innovation assessment of their own infrastructure and processes. In doing so, they granted a more complete view of their business structure and a clearer vision for future expansion.

To find out more about what N3XT Sports can offer your organization, please fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch. We look forward to hearing from you.