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Accenture Information Management Services

Giving business
a sporting chance

Point of View

When France lost soccer’s 2006 World Cup to

Italy, many fans blamed French superstar Zidane,
red-carded off the pitch for infamously head-
butting an Italian player. But far away from the
stands, astute observers attributed Italy’s win
to something subtler: the clever analysis of data.
Winning with analytics
Several of the Italian national team’s
players had been evaluated at Milan
Lab, AC Milan’s biomedical research
center for gauging players’ performance
and injury potential. The club considers
the lab a crucial advantage—a tool for
improving returns on the investments
it has made in its high-priced two-
legged assets. The lab tracks 60,000
data points on a player (200 on one
jumping motion alone) and analyzes
the statistics to ensure his health and
fitness. As a result, AC Milan has built
one of Europe’s top soccer teams—they
are current Champions League winners
and boast an impressive seven titles
in Europe’s premier cup competition.
The differentiator? An unwavering
emphasis on using data to make better
decisions—in short, the sports world is
tapping into the power of analytics.
Business people have long borrowed
insights from sports about teamwork
and leadership. But data, especially in
the form of statistics about players and
teams, has traditionally been fodder
for sports commentaries or office chat.
Only recently has hard data begun
to transform the management of
professional sports. In fact, some
sports executives now have much
to teach businesses about how to
profitably capture and analyze data.
These professionals have first-hand
experience of how the intelligent
use of analytics can improve asset
acquisition and management, talent
management, operational performance,
and even customer service.
The lessons could not be more timely.
The traditional bases of business
competition are eroding fast. Innovation
in products and services is more
challenging by the day. Product life
cycles keep shrinking, yet customer
expectations go on rising. Organizations
have more and more data on hand but
they have far less room for errors in
execution, so decision making has to be
sharper and better-informed. All in all,
these factors call for superior analytics
and deeper insights into what makes an
organization work.
For fresh ideas on how to better use
analytics to acquire talent, business
executives need look no further than
the football team, New England Patriots.
The Patriots do not use the same
scouting services that other teams
employ. They evaluate college players
even at the smallest schools and gauge
potential draft picks with criteria that
other teams don’t use—low ego and high
intelligence, for example. The team
tracks the data points on potential
players with a “Draft Decision Support
System” that is updated daily with new
reports from scouts. Analytics staff then
double-check the scouts’ rankings by
comparing west coast ratings with
similar east coast ratings. No detail is
overlooked as long as it can provide an
edge. How many organizations are
willing to employ a radically new
approach such as this to discover
hidden talent?
Operational performance can also
be enhanced through analytics, as
the Formula One race circuit proves.
As F1 drivers jostle to be first past
the checkered flag, technicians now
scrutinize dense streams of real-time
data that pour from more than a
hundred sensors on each car. It is
commonplace to see trackside engineers
collecting gigabytes of data from each
race, monitoring everything from engine
oil pressure to the stability of their
Ready for Analytics?
Accenture research1 shows how the
gap between the analytics exemplars
and their peers is widening. High-
performance businesses—those
that substantially outperform their
competitors over the long term and
across economic, industry and
leadership cycles—are twice as likely
to use analytics strategically compared
with the average company, and five
times more likely to do so than low
performers. The high performers are
well aware that technology on its
own cannot turn a company into an
analytical competitor; as such, they
put abundant time and effort into
developing robust analytical business
processes and capabilities.
cars’ chassis. Rapid data analysis helps
managers decide whether a car can
pull into the pits early, whether it can
take on less fuel or whether its gearbox
is heating up—just a few of the factors
where the right data at the right
time can help determine whether the
car finishes the race and where it is
finally placed.
Similarly, most business executives
could benefit by studying how Bolton
Wanderers Football Club in the United
Kingdom applies analytics to turn
its loyal fans into higher-spending
customers. Until fairly recently, almost
all of the British team’s income came
from ticket sales—a significant challenge
since its fan base was smaller than
that of many of the clubs with which it
competes. Today, Bolton Wanderers gets
a third of its revenues from non-revenue
activity—the consequence of capturing a
steady flow of data from the smart cards
carried by its fans and then analyzing
the data using a sophisticated customer
relationship management system.
These teams and many like them
have learned what it takes to get the
most out of their analytics approaches.
However, other Accenture research
found a significant IT capability
gap that company CIOs are racing
to address. For example, 21 percent
of the CIOs of leading global
organizations are aggressively
developing enterprise-wide analytical
infrastructures today and 76 percent
plan to develop enterprise-wide
analytics over the next three years.2
However, 78 percent report that they
remain hampered by report-driven
business intelligence systems that
operate in silos and are ill-equipped
to provide the sophisticated predictive
analytics a company needs to become
an analytical competitor.
One key insight: The approach must be
applied consistently. The former manager
of baseball team, the Boston Red Sox,
learned that lesson the hard way. The
Sox lost a pivotal game to their arch-
rival after the manager let a star pitcher
remain in the game well past the point
at which the analytical data had clearly
indicated that the pitcher would falter.
Consistency isn’t the only issue: An
analytical approach is only as good as
the data being used. Sports teams with
strong analytical capabilities are acutely
sensitive to the “garbage in, garbage
out” maxim. That explains why several
top F1 racing teams use hardware and
software solutions that are highly
compatible so the data their technicians
are monitoring is as accurate, consistent
and up-to-the-minute as possible.
Another way that sports teams gain
advantage is by discovering new metrics
such as the popular Roland Rating that
has become an accepted means of
measuring a basketball player’s value
to the team.
Some organizations are not waiting to
see what sports teams can teach them.
In virtually every industry and geography,
Whether using biometric data to
improve customer security at airports
or transforming merchandising for
major retailers, Accenture is working
with organizations today to help them
realize that analytics can not only
drive greater returns but bring a
new perspective to existing brands
and channels, offering businesses a
sporting chance in the race toward
high performance.
1
Source: Davenport, Thomas H. and
Jeanne G. Harris, Competing on Analytics:
The New Science of Winning, Harvard
Business School Press, Accenture,
March 2007.
2
Source: “Cultivating high performance
through information management,”
Accenture, 2007.
companies such as Google, Tesco,
Honda, Capital One and Harrah’s
Entertainment are already gaining
significant competitive advantage
by using analytics to out-think and
out-execute their competition.
For organizations that have not yet
started down this road, emulating
teams that know a thing or two about
successful competition can help
jumpstart their efforts.
Data, especially in
the form of statistics
about players and
teams, has traditionally
been fodder for sports
commentaries or office
chat. Only recently
has hard data begun
to transform the
management of
professional sports.
About the Author
Jeanne G. Harris is an executive
research fellow and director of
research at Accenture’s Institute
for High Performance Business,
where she leads research in the
areas of information, technology,
and strategy. She is co-author with
Tom Davenport of Competing on
Analytics: The New Science of Winning,
Harvard Business School Press, 2007.
Copyright © 2008 Accenture
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High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture.
About Accenture
Information
Management Services
Accenture Information Management
Services is a global cross-industry
organization focused on bringing
clients solutions to better manage
their business, interact with customers
and make strategic, financial and
operational decisions. Working across
Accenture’s service lines and industry
groups, this network of 13,000
professionals* specializes in
information management services
including business intelligence, portals
and content management and data
management and architecture. For
more information about Accenture
Information Management Services,
visit www.accenture.com/
informationmanagement.
*as of August 1, 2007.
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management
consulting, technology services and
outsourcing company. Combining
unparalleled experience, comprehensive
capabilities across all industries and
business functions, and extensive
research on the world’s most successful
companies, Accenture collaborates
with clients to help them become
high-performance businesses and
governments. With more than 175,000
people in 49 countries, the company
generated net revenues of US$19.70
billion for the fiscal year ended Aug.
31, 2007. Its home page is
www.accenture.com.
For more information about
competing on analytics contact:
Jeanne G. Harris
Executive Research Fellow
jeanne.g.harris@accenture.com