Dismantling data silos: How to build digital advocacy inside sports organizations

A reputable customer database requires room to evolve. Inside a sports property, it means building a data center that’s not only robust and easy to use; but is capable of being adapted and adopted throughout the organization’s entire ecosystem. 

Among the barriers to change, dismantling siloed – and often redundant – datasets remains one of the biggest challenges faced by companies. According to Treasure Data’s 2019 State of the Customer Journey study, 47 percent of marketers surveyed claim that data silos continue to be their major pain-point and makes data difficult to access across their company.

In relation to customer relationship management (CRM), according to Treasure Data’s more recent State of Customer Journey Management survey, although four in five (81 percent) of respondents say that their company already has a customer database, 38 percent identify that the customer journey within their company is siloed, too, and remains a serious challenge. 

Meanwhile, 28 percent reported that the customer journey was disjointed, highlighting a lack of coordination between customer touchpoints.

Speaking to N3XT Sports earlier in the year, LaLiga Tech’s innovation lead, Fabio Gallo, said that sports organizations beginning their own digital transformation must “avoid creating silos for their digital solutions”. Instead, he advises rights holders to deploy analytics tools capable of tracking “every one of their digital assets”, so as to capture and then consolidate customer interactions across all departments.

Therefore, as the sport’s industry seeks to digitize its operations and build long-term, digital strategies that aim to optimize administrative operations and maximize the customer experience, understanding how to modernize the digital and data architecture within an organization is an imperative first step towards building a connected, digitally native ecosystem. 

With data consumption predicted to rise exponentially in the decade ahead, by stripping back outdated operations and, in turn, building a scalable technology stack that gives an organization’s workforce access to a centralized data warehouse, sports entities are laying the foundations for future growth; preparing for a time when digital adoption and data management will become table stakes.

However, in order to navigate this change, rights holders continue to face several common challenges when it comes to beginning their own digital transformation journey. Before exploring which technology solutions offer the best return on investment, one of the key barriers for an organization is understanding the digital readiness of their operations.

This might also include the impact data silos – whether they were created intentionally or simply happened over time – have on a company’s productivity and the time wasted by employees who are unable to attain data within another department. Naturally, this can lead to a breakdown in communications internally, and, highlighted by Treasure Data’s findings, comes at a detriment to the customer relationship. 

By inviting each department and its personnel – as well as the organization’s external stakeholders – to partake in face-to-face interviews and workshops on the company’s digital transformation, this step grants the wider workforce the opportunity to address pain-points and challenges that they see inside the business; in turn, enhancing the speed and quality of the organization’s decision-making while, ultimately, freeing up employees to focus on more valuable tasks.

While empowering non- and lower-level decision-makers to contribute to the organization’s digital transformation, rights holders which adopt this analysis-first approach will build advocacy for digital adoption. This presents the company with a clear vision for its digitalization and, with access to better quality data across the business, one that demonstrates how technology can support a more fluid flow of information between departments and informs intelligent business decisions.

Whatever the stage of digitalization, analysis of this kind offers a sports organization key insights into their operations beyond their digital and data architecture. N3XT Sports is supporting rights holders at all stages of the digital transformation in developing forward-looking, long-term strategies that put the organization in the driving seat. Earlier still, our recently launched Digital Assessment Tool (DAT) also gives executives unsure when or how to begin their own digital transformation a free, comprehensive overview of their company, including the level of its digital literacy and technological maturity.

While modern technologies underpin sport’s digital evolution, accessible and easy-to-use data gives rights holders agility. Agility in terms of the organization’s ability to adapt to the expanding direct-to-consumer (D2C) landscape and the framework to adopt digital solutions that enhance the customer’s experience and open up new revenue streams and value drivers.  

This has been proven inside and outside of sport. Omar Zerrad, N3XT Sports Senior Consultant, Digital Transformation, points to the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) and the creation in 2018 of the union’s cloud-based, shared player management system called PA.NET, built in collaboration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure, as a prime example of how a sports organization’s digital transformation can support data collaboration between its stakeholders.     

Elsewhere, he also cites the way Air France-KLM Group, the international airline, has in the past decade adopted digital solutions to customize the user experience for some 15 million active members. By first building a comprehensive customer database into its digital infrastructure, the company was  able to deliver “dynamic fares” and bundled offers to customers booking flights via its digital channels.

“Early on in their digital transformation, for many organizations, establishing the right architecture and building the CRM are among the main points of focus and help consolidate cross-department communications with customers,” Zerrad says. “This, thereafter, enables personnel to access member information quickly and easily. Therefore, developing a CRM and adopting digital tools that help manage customer data is an important step to connecting the business and helps build the foundations for the organization’s digital evolution in the future.”

How this transformation is communicated to the whole organization is important, Zerrad continues, while engaging everyone in the company, to help them understand how and why change is necessary, it creates alignment across the business.

“In sport’s digital transformation, we sometimes hear of rights holders facing resistance to change in the boardroom, and that they are not so ‘digitally savvy’,” Zerrad says. “However, we also recognize a desire and appetite for change inside the industry and that often starts with the implementation of a digital infrastructure. 

“In order to minimize push back, by focusing on one department as a pilot, rights holders are able to build advocacy for digital transformation throughout the organization and can act as a pivot for digital evolution across other departments, too. Positive change management, whatever changes are made to the company’s digital infrastructure, is therefore imperative to building advocacy for digital adoption.”

An organization’s ability to diversify its operations rests on the creation of a digital infrastructure that owns the capacity to evolve. Gone are the days of time-consuming and costly paper-based communications. Whether used for internal operations or interacting with fans, stakeholders, and partners, as the sporting landscape becomes more digitally focused, it is vital that your infrastructure is too and, importantly, can move with the times. 

Building a data hub that offers a single source of truth for the entire operation depends heavily on curating a framework capable of aggregating the organization’s digital architecture. It’s important to note that transformation doesn’t arrive overnight, and is an ongoing process. Cleaning up your data and dismantling data silos marks the beginning of your digital transformation journey.

Nevertheless, developing a 360° overview of the business in this way helps your team to better understand its efficiencies in real-time. Furthermore, it also acts as the foundation on which an individual service or department within the organization can introduce digital solutions that support its independent workflows, without disrupting the customer journey nor creating data silos that could become a detriment to the company’s productivity in the future. 

By owning this level of agility, your digital transformation isn’t only a necessary next step, but will offer your company a bounty of opportunities to evolve the business more easily when the times to adopt new technologies into its existing operations or, equally, to recognize and wind down old ones when they eventually run their course. 

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