Web 2.0 in Practice—It’s All about a Great Experience for Users

North Americans love sports—ice hockey, baseball, football, to name a few—and for those unable to attend an event live or watch it on TV, the Web has become the place to turn. Thus, for any sporting team or association, a high-quality website has become a key way to build a loyal fan base and so a prime contributor to the organization’s drive toward high performance.

When one of the continent’s leading sports associations wanted to bring its outsourced website back in house, it turned to Accenture for help in creating a site that would provide a memorable experience for fans. The new site also had to enable the association to capitalize fully on Web-based advertising and merchandizing opportunities.

There was one unexpected complication: the association had terminated its contract with the previous outsourcer, which meant the timelines for getting the site ready for the next season were tight.

Accenture teamed with the association to design, build and implement a functionally rich, highly visible website using accelerators in the Accenture Delivery Suite for Java to jumpstart the development and execution architectures. The suite forms part of Accenture Delivery Architectures, and provides standard delivery architectures that provide support for custom application platforms. Using these accelerators enabled the Accenture development teams to focus on the actual development of the applications.

Critical timing

The compressed timeline meant that development time was limited to four months to allow for requirements gathering and performance testing. The team used the scrum development process to speed development and ensure that developers dealt first with the client’s top priorities—as Duston Mounts, an Accenture team lead on the project, reports. Read about the adrenalin rush of scrum development in our profile of Duston. To help the association attract and retain its fans to the website, the development teams used Adobe Flash and AJAX—both of which are Rich Internet Application technologies—to enhance usability and performance.

Along with Accenture Delivery Suite for Java, Accenture’s team made extensive use of the Accenture delivery architectures to support the design and development of multiple frameworks, including frameworks for content delivery, analytics, advertising, Web content management and batch processes. These technologies provided for online, graphical and highly interactive representation of live games, allowing drill-down to detailed background information.

Accenture used the Spring Batch framework, an open-source framework for developing enterprise batch applications, to support complex batch processes in the association’s Game Center functionality, a time-sensitive site component that provides a virtual representation of games in progress and needs to be fast to improve the user experience and so support the association’s drive to achieve high performance.

Scoring big for the sports association

Accenture’s teams were able to bring this complex website live on time, despite the punishing timelines. Since then, the sport association has been able to take full control of the customization and features development of its website: constantly updating features to accommodate changing user preferences is essential to continuing success.

The association hoped that the dynamic, feature-driven website would not only attract more visitors, but also open up attractive advertising and merchandising opportunities, so generating additional revenues. More importantly, this solution has helped the association position itself for the journey to high performance: sport is all about fans just as business is all about customers. The new website provides a better experience that will keep fans coming back for more—and its development architecture means the association can continue to keep the experience fresh for years to come. And that is a sound foundation for high performance.