'Moneyball' 2.0: Championship Strategies Converge for Sports and Technology

Sports and technology -- traditionally they have been the "oil and water" of business, just not mixing well. There could not have been two more opposite business models or participants. But times have changed.
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Sports and technology -- traditionally they have been the "oil and water" of business, just not mixing well. There could not have been two more opposite business models or participants, so much so that society actually segregated the two often-warring tribes into "the jocks" and "the geeks." As a former MLB player and now cloud software company CEO, I have experienced personally the perceived incompatibilities of these two groups.

Yet, over the last ten years a reconciliation of sorts has prevailed, to the point that now the integration of these two tribes is not only possible but actually occurring. This was illustrated quite vividly when Brad Pitt starred as the Oakland Athletics' charismatic EVP, Billy Beane, in the movie Moneyball.

Another example: you "geeks" may have heard these expressions over the last couple of years at a conference -- "We're in the first inning of DevOps" and "We're only in the third inning of cloud computing." As for you "jocks," suddenly player assessments and game strategies are no longer based on a coach's instincts. They are now chosen by a computer program that spits out data on which players should play based on several conditions, such as weather, time of game or field condition.

How is it that in the epicenter of technology, San Francisco, AT&T Park is packed every night with geeks who now love baseball? And across the Bay, the arena in which the Golden State Warriors play is actually sponsored by Oracle. My own favorite example of the coming together of sports and technology involves predictive analytics: every night that MVP Steph Curry gets on the basketball court, Twitter suffers a "glitch."

What is happening here, people?

It's called convergence. The fact is that both sports and technology share one very common bond, and that is that "performance matters." Performance bonds these seemingly disparate groups, because participants in both understand how difficult it is to perform flawlessly every day under changing conditions for an adoring, but demanding, public. In both industries, one small performance slip (error or bug) could cost your team the game or your brand its reputation.

There is a lot on the line in both the game of sports and the game of technology. For sports teams, winning brings more fans, endorsements and revenue. For digital brands, performance means more users, more conversions and more revenue. Failure is not an option for either; failure means that players get cut or employees get fired.

For the geeks, digital performance is a different game than when users were employees rather than revenue-producing consumers. Today, websites and mobile applications reach consumers that require their user experience to be both simple and fast. Otherwise, as with most sports fans, there is another game to watch... just a click away. Digital brands cannot afford to lose consumers and revenue to poor performance.

So, how are the two industries learning from each other?

Probably the biggest shift is the use of "film" by leading digital brands. In the sporting world today, every swing of every baseball player's career is recorded on film and then analyzed by both players and coaches. In digital, while many companies monitor "film" (the user experience), they only monitor about 5% of the actual experiences. In other words, they sample only some of the real results. This has led to some disastrous results, such as the early crash of Healthcare.gov. Today, leading digital brands are changing this sampling strategy by employing an emerging best practice where every real user experience is monitored and measured. They do this by using a new technology called Real User Measurement (RUM).

While not every RUM solution can scale to handle the millions, and sometimes even billions, of user experiences on mobile and websites, there are a few solutions that have the capacity to monitor and measure every user experience on the largest digital brands in the world. By employing these new RUM-based strategies, digital brands are gaining a much deeper understanding of the consumer experience. For many, employing "film," i.e. a RUM-based strategy, has become a huge competitive advantage.

In baseball, once game film has been analyzed, it's off to the batting cage, where the player faces a simulation of a performance problem. This helps the player work through the problem. For digital brands, the priority is to test or simulate the results of their RUM analysis or any possible performance scenario, such as Cyber Monday. No digital brand today wants to go from the film room to the next game without some practice time first. So many have set up custom-built testing platforms to be able to quickly optimize their performance.

Leading digital brands are continuously optimizing by monitoring and measuring with RUM solutions and simulating and optimizing within their own online "batting cage" to ensure the best user experience the next time they "play the game" with, for example, a new product launch or big online sales event.

Sports and technology have converged. It's time to "play ball"... digitally.

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