Balancing the Needs of Users and Your Organisation in Athlete Data Management

In today’s current market, many businesses perceive value creation as an integral and focal part of their business. This is often referred to as Value Centered Design. Due to differences in goals and context, this desired value and the perceptions surrounding it, often vary between the business (e.g. a football club) and the consumer (e.g. the athlete or coach). However, these differences can be alleviated by ensuring the value created involves a mixture of the goals targeted by both the business and the consumer.

Value Centered Design

In terms of sport, value is created by ensuring the goals of the business/club align and overlap with the goals of the athletes. In essence, the return on investment for the business/club should equal and balance with the return on experience for the athlete/consumer. It is vital to ensure a balance in value is created and the needs and goals of the athletes are not lost in the pursuit of business goals and vice versa. Ultimately, the offering and the delivery must be in align with each other. The diagram in Figure One demonstrates how Value Centered Design operates and creates a balance in value for both the business and the consumer.

Business Needs

For businesses, Smartabase has been designed to maximise use across the entirety of the organisation. This means both time and money can be saved by reducing costly and time consuming tasks through the use of the Smartabase data management. Furthermore, integration and automation is another key driving point of Smartabase for businesses. Smartabase is able to be integrated and automated with other software, such as Tibco Spotfire to deliver higher analytics information to management and decision makers.  Smartabase allows businesses to collect data and therefore use the data to assess and measure goals and targets and therefore increase the likelihood for successful return on investment.

Athlete and Coach Needs

For Consumers (athletes and coaches), Smartabase provides a platform for communication and engagement with all stakeholders. For example for athletes, this means they can constantly update their personal data to Smartabase through the mobile app and thus connect this data with all stakeholders e.g. their coaches, clubs etc. This data collection and collation with Smartabase empowers athletes to make clear, purposeful goals with distinct targets. It also assists athletes in asking questions in relation to what they want to find out about their performances and then provides them with a tool to collect and collate appropriate data to help discover answers and solutions. This entire experience must streamlined to ensure a positive experience for all users and stakeholders. Users and athletes can also maximize their use of Smartabase and therefore devise value by setting expectations and delivering them. This will increase the potential for greater value creation for both business and user.

Achieving the Balance

One of the most critical aspects of implementing a customizable athlete management system like SMARTABASE is to strive for value centered design at all times. With many databasing projects I have seen in the past, and even in the early days of SMARTABASE when we were even still learning how get it right, I have seen many organisations build incredibly complex databases but almost completely neglect to consider what the user’s would get back out of the system when they put the data in.

The key is in the planning. Before you start collecting data, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why are we collecting this data? What value does it possibly possess for the Business (e.g. club) and for the consumers (e.g. the athletes and coaches).
2. How are we going to make it easy for this data to get into the system, so that data entry presents the smallest inconvenience possible to users?
3. Once the data is in the system, how are we going to use it? What features of the system do we need to plan to use to make sure the information is used quickly and effectively?

The following image shows the SMARTABASE workflows which are typical to most of our clients. One the left side, we3 have the « Database » – a collection of data which is centralized, well organized and ready for use. Unfortunately this is where many software packages in the past have stopped. On the right side is what we call the « information system » side of things. This is where we use the data to deliver VALUE, to both the business, and also the consumers.

Summary

The successful implementation of any Athlete Management System involves maintaining a careful balance between the needs of all stakeholders. By following a value centered design approach through the implementation process will ensure this balance is maintained, and will lead to the greatest probability of user compliance and success.

The following video from the Opening Address of our 2014 SMARTABASE User Conference expands on this concept of value centered design, and also will give you a great introduction to what SMARTABASE is, the team behind it, and what we are doing to strive towards effective Athlete data management.