Accenture delivers rapid reporting for Six Nations
In sponsoring the Six Nations Rugby tournament, Accenture has shown how rapid prototyping can be applied to building enterprise reports
Through its sponsorship of the Six Nations Rugby tournament, Accenture has demonstrated how rapid prototyping can be applied to building enterprise reports.
“As the official technology and data supplier, we wanted to use it as a platform to showcase analytics,” explained Peter Thomas, marketing director at Accenture.
The IT services company used a data feed to build reports on the Six Nations Rugby tournament. This information is presented as infographics for newspapers and also sent to clients following the matches.
“300 to 400 senior clients get dedicated insight into the six nations, which we hope builds relationships and allows us to open up discussions,” said Thomas.
According to Accenture, the sports infographics reports demonstrate how a business could discuss ideas and create data visualisation quickly.
Will Gateshouse, big data lead at Accenture, said: “ We are using QlikView for rapid visualisation. We take very much an agile approach.”
He said the approach Accenture had taken with fast analytics can be applied outside the sports domain. The company takes data every minute from Optasports, which provides in-match analysis. Files are transferred using FTP to the Amazon AWS cloud, which runs the SQL Server database server and QlikView for reporting.
Accenture has taken an agile approach to creating the reports for the infographics. Concepts can be turned around on the fly.
For example, if someone has an idea that starts in the morning, “We'll have an afternoon meeting to see if it works,” Gateshouse said. By day two the idea will have been implemented as a report and working in production.
Gateshouse said: “I’m seeing the rapid conversion of ideas. You don’t know what questions you want answered but you need to get insight quickly. If the insight is good then you may want to put in a more industrial reporting platform.”
He said the benefit of using QlikView is that it is an interactive tool. “You don’t have to put lots of layers between the data and the visualisations,” Gateshouse said.
