Customers are increasingly relying on instant communication to make buying decisions and provide feedback on their experiences and logging this activity creates masses of raw data about customer behaviour.

However, many businesses and organisations are unsure about the role the analysis of this 'big data' can play in decision-making. Many are also unclear about how to create a strategy around it and also how to establish a return on investment (ROI) when it comes to investment in the necessary analytics systems to grapple with big data.

The sports industry may seem like a unique sector, with a different set of challenges from other industries, however, in many regards, it's much the same, with many of the same pressures and opportunities which face any other industry. And because it's experience-based, big data and analytics can play a unique and increasingly crucial role in its success.

Traditionally, analytics in sports has been reserved for on the field activities – complex statistical analysis of player and team performance, scouting reports and predictive analytics to try and optimise the outcome of a game or match. More recently, however, managers in sporting organizations are turning to analytics to understand more about the front office activities of a sports organisation.

Making the connection
Most sporting teams suffer from an inability to connect disparate data from across their business operations. Point of sale ticketing systems, concessions, retail and merchandise, dynamic pricing systems and CRM systems all collect and store data in separate databases. None of that data can be connected or compared. The result? Countless hours trying to stitch the business together using spreadsheets. The consequence? The organisation is left in an entirely reactive state, incapable of engaging in the strategic activities necessary to remain competitive.

Our experience working with sporting teams and venues has shown that the equivalent time in hours to two to three full-time employees is spent annually by organisations manually creating reports to try and analyse their businesses. But as expenditure on player salaries continues to outpace the growth of revenue in business operations, teams are turning to analytics to extract the meaningful insights into their business and data about their fans to drive increased attendance and revenue.

Analysing the analytics
By leveraging big data and analytics, sporting organisations are able to:
- Get real-time views of the 'front office'
- See the patterns and relationships that exist between disparate data sources (for example which items in concessions are most popular with season pass holders versus general admission buyers?)
- Understand which fans visit most often, and least often
- Quantify which supporters are most valuable from an economic standpoint (their lifetime value)
- Predict which fans are likely to churn
- Understand the relationship between the on-field performance of a player or team and business performance (for example:  in baseball, understanding what impact batting average of a particular player has on merchandise sales of that player’s shirts in the gift shop)
- Analyse, forecast and predict attendance and revenue based on external factors such as weather data
- Understand what fans are saying about the team and their experience in social media and on the internet in real-time
- Optimise payroll and staffing
- Leverage analytics to optimise energy usage and consumption in a stadium

A key balance is needed with regard to managing what data can be collected, and the impact that can have on real and perceived concerns around privacy. For example, today there are organisations which can pinpoint the location of your wi-fi-enabled smart phone in real-time to within 3ft. With this technology, it's possible to calcuate how long individuals are spending in certain parts of the facility, what the capture rate is for particular locations that are being promoted, and where first-time customers choose to go, versus loyal, repeat buyers.

This raises serious questions around how big data analytics can being used, while also maintaining an individual's right to privacy.

Fortunately, our experience reveals that the majority of organizations are using this technology in a responsible manner, purely with the aim of enhancing the customer experience. Extending this through opt-in apps on mobile devices enables organisations to personalise offers based on contextually aware content, as well as location-aware content. Our experience is this sort of technology is being adopted at a slower and more cautious pace in Europe than in the United States, for example.

The Future
There's a trend of IT moving from the server room to the boardroom and we’re seeing a fusion of business and IT in the modern sports team. Managers and executives are becoming more technical and IT leaders are becoming far more business savy and aware of commercial pressures.

As businesses become inquisitive about data and look to increase income by leveraging analytics, the software industry has responded by making modern analytics software easier to use and more approachable for non-technical staff.

Work which used to require a team of IT professionals to deliver can now be done by the average business manager in the front office of a sports organisation. Dashboards, real-time reporting and ad-hoc analysis of the business are all options now available to the modern sports organisation that didn't exist even a decade ago.

As business becomes more technical, IT specialists are evolving to understand more of what businesses needs to be proactive.

The modern IT professional in a sporting organisation is far more than someone providing hardware and desktop software support. They have to be effective at working with senior leaders and translating their needs into actionable outcomes which leverage the latest in IT.