In 2015, a new real-time notifications system made an impact on the first day of The Championships, Wimbledon when Lleyton Hewitt hit the 1500th winner of his Wimbledon tennis career. The system pre-warned Wimbledon’s digital and content team of his impending sports statistics milestone. It offered sufficient time to build a tile of richer content to share on social media as soon as the event occurred, breaking news faster than global media organizations.
Since last year’s tournament, I have seen an increase in demand for real-time insight in numerous organizations. Maintaining a current, real-time view of what is happening in the business allows pertinent information to be pushed to those who need to act on it as events unfold. Such information might relate to key performance indicators, highlight a drop off in performance, or trigger and alert that something requires action. In all cases, the user knows something needs to be done now, rather than finding out after the event.
One application of such capabilities is in the prediction and prevention of equipment failures allowing component repair or replacement. This averts outages and leads to a better managed, more resilient service. Another is to optimise and personalise inbound marketing campaigns so that sales are increased and customer service improved during that customer interaction rather than understanding what opportunity you could have taken sometime later.
Having such insight immediately available enables business leaders to make decisions using data rather than relying on gut instinct because no current view is available.
In 2016, one extension we have made to the real-time notifications solution at Wimbledon is to maintain leaderboards. This allows provision of additional insight on the relative performance of players to be provided to Wimbledon’s digital and content team as events unfold in context.
