Louis Van Gaal’s Manchester United team have made a promising start to the new football season. The Red Devils are sitting near the top of the Premier League and have made it to the Champions League group stage after a year without European competition.
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United boast Old Trafford, the largest club stadium in England, but each goal that hits the back of the net is not just celebrated by the 75,000 fans at the match – they are also cheered by a community of 659 million followers around the world keeping track of the action online. In September, the club announced a partnership with HCL Technologies to help bring its players, fans and sponsors closer together than ever before through the club’s website, its mobile app and other channels. Manchester United group managing director Richard Arnold called the deal “a very important step” for the team.
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“Through this collaboration we hope to change the
way we interact with our fans around the world,” he
said at a press conference on a rainy day at Old
Trafford. “We will work together to build digital
platforms which enhance the ways in which fans
experience the club and further enhance our digital
presence.”
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A key part of the partnership is the United Xperience
Lab at Old Trafford, which will act as a base for the
club to work with HCL to explore the ways in which it
can improve its fans’ digital user experience. The lab
is the first of its kind at a sporting club and only the
seventh such initiative in the world.
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Arnold said the club’s work with its first digital
transformation partner would focus not just on the
number of interactions it has with its fans, but on the
quality of those contacts, too. He stressed the
importance of this work to the future of the club.
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“Having a strong engagement with a family of fans as
big as ours is a recipe for success,” he said. “That
success off the pitch is what drives the success on
the pitch in a sustainable way. Those learnings are
very, very important in driving that engagement.”
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Former United defender Denis Irwin, who made 529
appearances and scored 33 goals for the club
between 1990 and 2002, said the move was symbolic
of technology’s increasing role in football for both
players and fans. “The game has changed,” he said.
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“The experience for fans has changed. The majority
of our fans cannot get to Old Trafford so we have to
engage them. Technology is a huge part of the game
now for the players, the media and the fans. It gets
the fans involved and I am sure we will see a lot
more of it. It is making the game more entertaining.”
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Under the new partnership, fans will play a key role
in influencing the user experience of a new Manchester United website and mobile app, as well as exploring ways in which emerging technologies
like the internet of things and wearables could be
used. “As we think about wearables and other
devices we can test that out in the lab and show what
the value is before we set out,” said Jaco Van Eeden,
global head of HCL’s Beyond Digital business unit.
“We want to bring a better experience on a
continuous basis.”
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When it comes to which services and providers will
be used to deliver that continually improving experience, efficiency and sustainability will be key factors in the decision. “When we go into public cloud computing we will consider how we are stepping up the efficiency and sustainability aspects,” explained Ashish Gupta, HCL’s executive vice president and head of infrastructure services for the EMEA region.
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But the initiative also needs to be able to grow and
adapt to avoid the nightmare so many CIOs face: a
legacy system that needs to be replaced to be improved. “We will have to make a choice of what is most scalable – the architecture and the way we will put it together,” Van Eeden said. “It is almost like little applets, so it becomes scalable. It is built in an agile, flexible way so it can connect to other services and applications.”
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According to Van Eeden, analytics and capabilities
will be high on HCL’s list of priorities, to ensure the
setup is efficient but also extendable, and able to
incorporate any future features or technologies that
emerge in the coming years.
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