How the England and Wales Cricket Board scored with big data

The England and Wales Cricket Board governs every aspect of the sport in those two countries, and it holds massive amounts of data generated by professional and amateur players alike. Since its founding in 1997, the ECB has collected information on every aspect of its operations, including players, partners, youth leagues, coaches, stadiums, ticket sales, marketing initiatives and more.

The Challenge: Unlocking a Gold Mine of Disparate Data

All of those data sets added up to a potential gold mine of information, and the ECB knew it. But the value of that information wasn’t fully accessible. It was stored across some 19 different data sources, all of which needed to be integrated before they could deliver useful business intelligence. To Damian Smith, ECB’s Director of IT, that business intelligence is the key to cricket’s future growth. In an interview with CIO UK, Smith stressed the importance of data in providing actionable insights. “We need to keep reinventing ourselves to maintain an interest in cricket, to attract new audiences to the game,” he told the site.

Cricket as a Social Network Model

In Smith’s view, the ECB is effectively a social network. “I've been saying national governing bodies have the same business models as Facebook,” he said. “Our product is our participants. The more participants we have, the more value we can generate from the game and invest in the game. The more we know about them, the more we can extract from the government, sponsors, and broadcasters.”

Architecting a Modern Data Lake Solution

To help the ECB harvest the full value of its data, Pythian architected and designed a platform to integrate those 19 individual data sources on a single platform, using Google Cloud. They also implemented a data lake for raw data storage using Cloudera Hadoop.

Immediate Results and Performance Gains

The results were immediate. Data-analysis exercises that previously took between three and six months could now be completed in hours. The traditional bottlenecks around data management and business intelligence disappeared, allowing the ECB to transform itself into a more disciplined, data-driven organization.

Transforming the Game: From Elite Selection to Fan Experience

The benefits have been seen at every level of the game. At the elite level, the ECB now has superior tools to select and prepare cricketers for England teams. This alone marked a radical change for team selectors, who for generations had chosen players by instinct. “They became evidence-based rather than gut-feel-based,” Smith said.

Performance Analytics and Biometrics

The technology is also enabling strategies for keeping England’s top players injury-free. “I’m responsible for some really cool systems,” Smith said. “Biomechanical analysis, video analysis, biometric systems, radar technology that assesses the telemetry of a cricket ball. Devices and wearables on players to tell us how much stress they’re under — all systems to support the elite end of the game."

Enhancing Community Engagement and Match-Day Experience

The power of objective data extends to the community level, as well. The ECB can now reach and motivate thousands more participants, be they spectators or players. The value of data even reaches individual seats in the stadium, where fans can enhance their experience by viewing instant replays and real-time analyses on their mobile devices.

Future Goals: Attracting New Audiences

As for new goals, Smith spoke of a determination to attract new audiences to the game, particularly more women, children, and families. Acknowledging that cricket’s traditional audience is “pale, male and stale,” Smith credited this year’s Women's World Cup with boosting the diversity of the sport’s fan base. The future of cricket is brighter than ever, said Smith. “Pythian helped us unlock the value in our data by giving us a platform that enabled us to very quickly integrate disparate data sets and put actionable insight into the hands of the people who need it.”

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