England Hockey Single Source of Truth
EH SST SYSTEM
If you were the governing body of a sport that is played by over 140,000 players across a network of over 800 clubs, how would you collate the information from multiple data management platforms to provide a simplified yet more insightful solution that’s capable of actively increasing participation while simultaneously supporting those that are already involved in the sport?
England Hockey recently called upon the expertise of INFOREXX to devise, design, and deliver a comprehensive system capable of meeting the requirements of activities from grassroots action to elite level action, including Team GB’s Olympics endeavours. Through a Single Source of Truth (SST) platform, England Hockey’s data collation and these data easy use are effective, subsequently opening the door to a plethora of new opportunities.
Overcoming The Challenges Of An Disparate And heterogeneous IT Systems
England Hockey set out with the simple objective of bringing sports data together in one database to promote and facilitate consistent and transparent communication to clubs, members, competitions, coaches, venues, and all associated members of the country’s hockey family with the ultimate goal of generating an increase in participation, viewership, and financial opportunities.
As with many sporting web tools and independent internet sport management systems, England Hockey had found that the lack of a unified and consolidated platform across the board has led to a varied range of management software being used by different clubs and members within the hockey community. Contrasts in data collection and commercial approach across platforms like Fixtures Live, Pitchero, SportLomo, ClubBuzz, and Dotmailer posed several challenges in reaction to collation, which were subsequently exacerbated by challenges of exchanging user data from partner systems.
Without automated system-to-system bulk data exchange, as well as the threat of duplicate records, England Hockey’s ability to communicate with umpires, representatives, coaches, fans, and key personnel had been hindered for years. An updated infrastructure was needed, but its creation would not be easy. That’s where INFOREXX steps in.
The Single Source of Truth Solution
Collating information from various management software platforms into one destination posed many technical and collaboration challenges. INFOREXX introduced and incorporated a Single Source of Truth database to serve as a new data model and platform for the sport’s data exchange.
The new SST delivers the data model, structure, and rules for data quality, specifically for England Hockey’s clubs, competitions, and members while embracing lead technical cooperation with the market software providers mentioned above. While the current release focuses on the data exchanges of clubs and competitions, the next phase of framework implementation plans to extend this to members and individual users for personal data handling. The SST’s automation properties allow for data exchanges to take place without forcing human members to spend hours completing manual changes. Moreover, the feature that allows for clubs and members to merge facilitates an even easier transition but also by human control.
Many of the features used in the SST are automated and integrated with an array of tools that are designed to aid data governance, data processing and the utilising of modern IT technologies to provide continued data-driven insights that place the ground to boost the passion, participation, and profile of the sport to previously unfathomable levels.
What Benefits Has England Hockey Seen?
Thanks to the help of INFOREXX, England Hockey now has a single sports data system that spans across all clubs and tournament IT management systems from the grassroots level to the professional game to deliver a wealth of tangible and intangible rewards, including but not limited to;
- Greater consistency of data across the entire England Hockey family.
- Increased reach to players, coaches, organisers, and fans at all levels of the game.
- The removal of compatibility issues, duplicate data, and contrasting data.
- Easier management of all data to confirm accuracy and relevance.
- Increased data quality underpinned by lead technical cooperation.
- Guaranteed data security without worrying about third-party hockey stats services.
- Simple integration with API, CSV, XML, JSON, Amazon storage, Azure storage, and Azure SQL.
- Financial savings and time savings for England Hockey and its members.
Customer Profile
DCisions measures the investment performance experienced by consumers and tracks their behaviours over time, including product selection and saving decisions. To achieve that DCisions utilises its CuBIT proprietary insight platform sitting at the heart of the DCisions business. CuBIT starts with data feeds from DCisions partners, then it transforms and analyses customer level data to provide unprecedented insight into consumers’ investment behaviour and experience.
Project CuBIT
INFOREXX was integral to the CuBIT Release 2 project and has made significant contributions through all project stages including project management, shaping business requirements, designing an improved system architecture, managing code development, contributing to project risk management and delivering reliable, robust testing data reconciliation.
“INFOREXX delivered an outstanding service creating a highly reliable and quality solution for our business critical system. We appreciated the skill with which INFOREXX addressed our business requirements and came up with innovative ways to solve the challenges in building solutions for our business needs. We are happy that we had an INFOREXX consultant on the delivery team at every stage of the project lifecycle, he significantly contributed to the successful and timely delivery of CuBIT.“
Adrian King
VP, Technology & Operations
DCisions
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