Digital transformation strategy and ongoing strategic guidance for a global sporting organisation

Due to the confidential nature of strategic consulting, I can't typically publicly mention the brands I work with. Instead, I can say that I have been working with a governing sporting body for over a year, one which organises international tournaments, and facilitates their sport at all levels. They have millions of customers, such as patrons and fans, participants at every level and age, coaches, teachers, clubs, competition officials and organisers, broadcast partners, and the event workforce who make their tournaments possible. Today, their digital experiences are fragmented, forcing customers to work too hard to do the jobs they need to do. I have been working with them and my consulting partner to build a digital unification blueprint and future channel concepts, which has led to a new site build and learning channel optimisations, while also providing ongoing strategic support.

I designed an approach to addressing their complex digital ecosystem, one which would result in a digital unification blueprint to help them unify their disconnected websites and apps. Through this process myself, a UX designer and a solution architect analysed existing research to see how over 100 digital touchpoints were being used by customers; allowing us to create an  ecosystem map to show all unification gaps, such as  disjointed booking processes and disconnected information with multiple logins. 

We also analysed multiple organisations inside of and outside of the sporting industry, how they were unifying their channels and how they were implementing emerging technology. This resulted in a scorecard the organisation could mark themselves against.

After designing a number of options, they chose the new channel architecture they wanted to implement. In future, customers will access an all encompassing and personalised website where they can login with SSO to access a dashboard that gamifies all their activity and incorporates ecommerce and a new loyalty system. There will be additional authenticated web channels in future, such as a centralised LMS. Separate sites will exist for their key tournaments and a suite of mobile apps will focus on those tournaments, playing at different levels, coaching, officiating and gaming.

To help them act on this future state, a number of guidelines, prioritisation frameworks and roadmaps were created. A larger delivery team, made up of multiple designers, technologists, content practitioners and delivery experts have been working on the recommended centralised website, powered by a new CMS and facilitating multiple complex booking processes.

I have been developing new channel concepts and working with their leaders to provide new frameworks and approaches to strategic problems. So much of my work has also been storytelling; reframing approaches and narratives to appeal to a diverse range of stakeholders who are preparing for a significant change. This has included recommendations on digital team structures and how broad topics like personalisation are applicable to what the organisation wants and needs to do to make it a reality.

All in all, it has been a very effective transformation engagement, incorporating my approach to human-centred experience ecosystem engineering.