Johannesburg, 10 Aug 2022
Whether you are in charge of a high-performance organisation or a world-beating sports team, data and analytics can deliver greater competitiveness and boost the quality of your results.
Today, the top global sports teams use data and analytics to improve their training, keep track of their health and performance, better understand their competitors, fine-tune their game plans and drive higher levels of fan engagement.
It's big business too. The data and analytics in sports market was $2.58 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow massively to $16.5 billion by 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 23%.
What lessons do sports teams have to offer businesses as they deploy new tools to achieve data-driven decision-making capabilities?
Based on experience with enterprises seeking to unlock greater value from their data initiatives, companies can benefit by adhering to the following three lessons from how sports teams use data to drive their performance and success:
Lesson 1: Position data insights as part of a winning recipe for success
Despite the ongoing disruption caused by the pandemic, conflict in Ukraine and general geopolitical upheaval, strategy remains an essential component in every successful enterprise. While companies should be prepared for ongoing change, there is still great value in developing a broader business strategy, especially since all successful tech deployments are underpinned by clear business strategy objectives.
A winning strategy or game plan is essential in sports, too. And here, data and analytics play a crucial role in equipping coaches, managers and players with actionable insights into their own performance and that of their competitors.
Modern sports teams are increasingly reliant on big data and advanced analytics to develop, improve and fine-tune their game-day strategies. Take the example of Liverpool Football Club's recent domination of the English Premier League. Liverpool's managers and coaches make extensive use of data science to understand their opponents' strategies, enhance their own team's performance and consistently edge out competitors.
Lesson 2: Make business intelligence exciting, usable and shareable
Notice how broadcasters use statistics, slow-motion analyses and in-depth discussions around specific areas of a sports game to make it more compelling to viewers? From cricket to football to tennis, technology is playing a central role in enhancing the viewing experience by delivering deeper levels of insight to sports fans.
Data and analytics teams can learn much from this. One of the top reasons data and analytics initiatives fail is due to lack of adoption by business users. Without a clear and compelling set of use cases, business users who have grown accustomed to performing tasks in specific ways are unlikely to shift their behaviour simply because there are new tools available.
However, when the new data tools are positioned as helpful additions that bring value to day-to-day tasks as well as longer-term planning, adoption rises and the business can enjoy improved outcomes from its data and analytics activities.
Lesson 3: Use data to track and improve individual and team performance
New technologies tracking athletes' health and performance have become so popular that it's entered the mainstream consumer market. Most mobile phone manufacturers, for example, now offer some form of health-tracking wearable device, usually in the form of a smartwatch.
These devices track athletes' heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose levels and more to give a real-time view over their health and performance. These data insights then guide diets, training regimes, rest and recuperation.
Similarly, organisations can use data to track and guide employee performance. Using human capital management solutions that are integrated to the business's data and analytics platform, companies can gain a clear view into the performance of individual employees, teams, departments or even the overall business.
Having accurate, data-driven insights into the performance and experience of their employees gives companies a measurable way of driving improvements in specific areas of the business, such as talent retention, and can guide overall talent and operational strategies.
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