Case Study: IBF nets its Olympic Draw - September 2004  

The recent online electronic draw for the badminton event at the 2004 Athens Olympics was the culmination of three years work that digital sports solutions company Sportcal.net undertook to redevelop the International Badminton Federation's (IBF) entire information technology system. Sportcal.net is the technology arm of Sportcal Global Communications Limited, producer of Sportcal.com, a leading online information service for the sports industry.

The Olympic draw was conducted by IBF vice-president and chair of the events committee, Charoen Wattanasin, from the press centre in Athens, where the Olympic media were gathered, and was immediately visible through a monitor in the press centre and live through the internet on worldbadminton.net. Vanessa Freeman, director of events for the IBF, says: "I was in Athens overseeing the draw being made and it was very successful. The benefit of using the computerised draw is that it is simultaneously published on the website which enables everyone to watch the draws being made live."
The IBF Draw Programme has now drawn over 3,700 matches from 182 tournaments since its launch in October 2002, and has become an essential working tool for the federation and its members.
In 2001, the IBF decided it needed to make the draw using a more transparent process, together with utilising the capabilities of the website, and a specification was written to re-design a very old in-house system that IBF had been using for many years.
The draw had traditionally been made by the IBF staff in Cheltenham, England but IBF wanted to give the onus back to the event organisers to run the draw itself. The flexibility of the draw packages enables organisers to run the draw at a time that is preferable to them to gain good media exposure, even when the IBF office is closed. The benefit from an IBF side is that the draws are run in accordance with the IBF regulations.
By redeveloping the draw programme into an online internet application the IBF was able to make the draw process much more open and allow not only officials but also the players, the coaches and the media to see the draw taking place live over the internet.

Revamping the IBF systems

The redevelopment of the draw programme was the second phase in the revamp of IBF's information technology systems. The first phase was the redevelopment of IBF's results and ranking system. For many years the IBF had two systems, one for the results and one for the draw, and needed to transfer data from one system to the other to make the draw possible.
Sportcal.net was awarded the contract to redevelop the IBF system following the work the company had done for other international federations including IAAF (athletics), ITF (tennis), ISAF (sailing) and FITA (archery).
The first phase saw the development of a players management system, which managed all information on players participating in IBF events, and an event management system, which managed details on all IBF events. Once all players and events had been entered into the system, with their own unique identities, the results could then be entered for each discipline at each event.
The initial by-product of this work was the automatic production of the IBF rankings. Because each system was designed as an internet-ready application the rankings could be automatically published through the IBF website, with a full breakdown of how the points were calculated, where each player's points were awarded and a full summary of their ranking progression.
The second by-product was the production of media reports from the results entered for each tournament. These reports included player progressions and full CV's, showing how a player had progressed during the course of the year, with details on who they had beaten, who they had lost to and what the scores had been, and a full head-to-head summary showing how two players had performed against each other.
Once the ranking and results systems had been redeveloped, it was then relatively straightforward to use the databases developed for these systems as the basis for the draw programme.
The IBF draw is a complex system, which has national separation, where the top two seeds from each country cannot be drawn in the same half of the draw as each other. It also has specific places for seeds and byes which all need to be factored into the calculation of the draw. The sequence in which players are drawn also has to be random, both in the order in which they are drawn and where they are placed in the draw.
The initial stage in developing the draw programme was to create an entry system for players so that each player entering an event could be allocated a place in the main or qualifying stage of the draw. Once the entries were made, the seeds were then calculated using the rankings created by the ranking program. Once the seeds were allocated the draw could then be made automatically.
The integration of the draw programme with the results and ranking programme greatly improved the management of the draw process and removed any problems previously encountered by the old systems.
The fact that the draw was a ready-made internet application also meant that the draw could be run from anywhere in the world simply at the push of a button.

Web redevelopment

The final phase of the redevelopment of the IBF's information systems was the revamp of the federation's website. The IBF originally had two websites, an official federation site and a more consumer-orientated website called worldbadminton.net. It was decided that the two sites should be consolidated into one and feed all the data from the newly-created information management systems through the website, including the rankings, the players' media reports and the newly-created draw programme.
The website contract was also awarded to Sportcal.net and within three months worldbadminton.net was re-launched in time for the World Championships in Birmingham, England in August 2003.
The new site was based on Sportcal.net's web management modules that provide a user-friendly content management and security administration system. The system enables the user to create content-rich web pages without the need for technical training or programming skills.
The website has been a great success and in the lead-up to the Olympic draw in Athens traffic had trebled in a year, with 8.6m page impressions being generated since its re-launch.
The success of the site has been attributable to a combination of the re-design of the site making it more attractive and easier to navigate, and also to the content-rich applications enabling the data to be automatically refreshed, encouraging the web visitor to constantly return to the site to check the latest information.
Mike Laflin, CEO of Sportcal.net, says: "The success of the IBF Draw Programme and its website is a result of the long-term strategy adopted by the IBF. We needed to improve their content management systems in order to improve their website. Without the initial work in re-developing their results and rankings systems it would not have been possible to create the online draw programme. Without this, the website would not have been so successful and we would have never achieved the traffic levels we have achieved in a year."
He adds: "One direct result of the relaunch of the site is that the sale of merchandise has dramatically increased, leading to the unique position that the IBF website is now self-financing."

For further information on the IBF website visit www.worldbadminton.net or contact Lindsey Bell, IBF Communications Officer; e-mail: lindseyb@intbadfed.org telephone: +44 (0)1242 23 49 04
For further information on Sportcal.net and its suite of content management modules contact Mike Laflin, CEO, Sportcal.net; e-mail: mike.laflin@sportcal.net telephone: +44 (0)20 8944 8786

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