Spanning sport’s collection of domestic and international competitions there is a bounty of different strategies for technology adoption and digital transformation. Its differentials can be traced to the individual rights holder’s business objectives and how its existing digital framework uniquely drives audience growth, customer retention, and a healthy return on the entity’s technology investment.
Amid uncertain economic times, financial outlooks project a significant downturn in technology spend in 2023, driven in part by a drop off in capital funding in the startup sector. In response, there are a number of rights holders leveraging their digital transformations in order to optimize productivity across departments, highlighting areas of the business where technology integration can drive cost savings.
According to N3XT Sports Chief Executive, Mounir Zok, this holistic approach is indicative of a “growing awareness” among sports executives for the cost benefits of digitalization, including how a more “tactile” digital transformation strategy helps to raise operational efficacy and employee performance. Gartner research finds that four in five (80 percent) of CEOs globally claim they will increase their technology investment this year to counter economic pressures. Nevertheless, the vast majority (95 percent) ‘struggle’ to develop a ‘vision for digital change’.
Albeit a challenge felt by other digitally focused sectors, too, our latest 2023 Digital Trends in the Sports Industry report cites a much lower change-management maturity among sports businesses. This is despite sport owning a comparatively higher speed to market when it comes to innovation, highlighting a disconnect between the desire for delivering customer-facing applications and the industry’s ability to integrate technologies into their current digital infrastructure.
“It is important to think beyond the fan/customer-facing opportunity and ensure that any new activity can be administered by the employees,” explains Motasem El Bawab, N3XT Sports Chief Information Officer (CIO). “By implementing the right combination of technologies and software solutions within a data-driven business model – including a customer relationship management (CRM) capability – sports properties are able to enhance the employee experience (EX), too.
“This, in turn, caters for a higher digital maturity among their workforce, strips out unnecessary workflows or bottlenecks, while allowing the organization to continue to augment its digital assets and propel their speed to market.”
OLYMPIC MOVEMENT DEMONSTRATES IMPORTANCE FOR CLOUD ADOPTION
At the center of sport’s ongoing digital transformation, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is among a handful of global federations benchmarking the benefits of technology integration across its entire stakeholder ecosystem. With a heavy focus on the digital transformation of their respective organizations, recent years have seen the Olympic Movement, in collaboration with the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), turn attention to the cloud orchestration of its technology systems during the Summer and Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games.
For example, the IOC’s and IPC’s dedicated information technology (IT) partner, Atos, oversaw the migration of all critical applications during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games in the Atos cloud. Among its benefits, the migration to the cloud helped to reduce the number of IOC’s physical servers in operation during the Games to 130, down from 250 at Rio 2016, and contributed to a 50 percent reduction in technology staff required on the ground with many able to work on the event remotely.
At the time, IOC President Thomas Bach said that the partnership “has been truly instrumental in connecting, securing and digitally enabling the Olympic Games […] to all stakeholders worldwide, while decreasing the environmental impact of our IT operations […] and helping us to connect digitally with all our fans around the world”. Elsewhere, Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) adopts Alibaba’s cloud technologies to bolster and optimize the IOC’s Games broadcasts via the OBS Cloud, for example, including the ability for faster, remote production and post-production using fewer resources.
The role of cloud adoption extends to the IOC’s and IPC’s other stakeholder partners, too, and sees the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Organising Committee (LA28) adopt a “cloud-only” ecosystem. This was emphasized by David Michael, LA28’s CIO, who highlights in our Digital Roadmap 2030 report the importance of cloud adoption for delivering the Games in 2028 and aligning its stakeholders, including the City of Los Angeles.
“Understanding the wants and needs of your fans and stakeholders is […] very important,” Michael explains. “Only then can you ensure what you’re delivering is going to help on their journey. The first thing to consider is that we don’t have what’s often known as ‘technical debt’ – infrastructure which is out of date and old-fashioned. As a startup, we can truly leverage the cloud. While others build systems which are ‘cloud-first’, our team at LA28 are ‘cloud-only’, meaning that everything we do is with the vision to drive efficiencies and innovate.
“Our partnerships with Deloitte and Salesforce, for example, help us take advantage of modern technologies to deliver the 2028 games. In order to achieve this, one thing we need to do is to create a solid, scalable capability from which we can grow from being a startup into effectively a multi-billion-dollar corporation. The way that we do that is by collaborating with our great partners, the most important being the City of Los Angeles itself, which is doing so many important things in the build-up to the Games, and also for the residents and people of LA, particularly the underserved, to access digital resources.”
WHAT’S N3XT?
Aligning the structure of a business to its objectives can feel at times like a necessary burden, whereby one understands the importance for transformation but the journey might seem too long or an impossible investment. This needn’t be the case. Nor does it need to be a costly or time-consuming endeavor.
On the contrary, while change management is often a challenge cited by sports executives, technology integration is a simple and effective approach for improving the employee experience (EX) internally, while also laying the foundations for transformation in the future. That might include the potential for integrating a tool or process which helps the business run more efficiently and therefore reduces operational costs, or to scale its direct-to-consumer (D2C) inventory and unlocks an unforeseen revenue opportunity .
Our team at N3XT Sports works tirelessly to develop and implement digital strategies across a multitude of sports properties at federation level, competition level, and club level. To learn more about how digital transformation can support the growth of your organization and optimize your technological infrastructure, fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch. Our goal is to drive the digitalization of the sports industry and our clients.