Growth assessment for gaming operator’s core strategic systems

After achieving significant growth through acquisitions, a gaming operator's core IT systems environment was complex and disjointed. Not only did the business face current inefficiencies, IT complexity was hindering future growth.

The company required a solution for their core wagering systems and, in particular, a detailed assessment of an emerging solution to determine its functional and technical fit for their future business requirements and opportunities.

Challenge
The company engaged A.T. Kearney for an extensive and objective due diligence of an emerging wagering system. They needed to assess the system's ability to drive core systems renewal and complexity reduction in the current environment. Additionally, the company wanted a recommendation on the quality of the vendor as a potential commercial investment opportunity.

The new system needed to deliver current required capabilities, such as high transaction throughput, rapid information dissemination, on- and off-course distribution, diversified channels, etc. And also future capabilities, including multi-language and multi-locale manufacturing, rapid product development, national and international reconciliation, international regulatory compliance, etc.

Approach
The project team engaged a wide range of the company’s IT and business management leaders and staff to ensure strategic and tactical input throughout the project.

They designed and followed a four-part, structured approach:

• Defined and assessed the key domains of functionality required to fully support the current business requirements and processes
• Developed emerging and future functional requirements for the gaming industry and wagering systems, based on senior managers' input, extensive market research, and A.T. Kearney experience and expertise
• Created a services framework, based on synthesized requirements, against which the current and emerging platforms could be extensively assessed
• Developed a technical framework - including architecture, development practices, operational capability, and performance scalability - to assess each solution’s technical robustness

Results
The services framework, providing the necessary conceptual basis, plus the detailed technical framework, gave the company the ability to evaluate and select solutions that meet both current requirements and future needs. These extensive frameworks span the entire functional map of the organization, from product definition and race-day setup, to disseminating information and taking bets, through paying dividends and reconciling and reporting results.

In addition, the frameworks and assessment results position the gaming company with the capability to:

• Formulate a logical architecture for the basis of their legacy renewal process
• Determine the suitability of each system for individual areas of the future services framework and future roadmap for migration

Finally, based on the objective assessment conducted by A.T. Kearney, the client was able to make an informed investment decision with respect to the potential acquisition, enabling a more agile approach to their future technology direction. Ultimately, this assessment resulted in alternative investment strategies than the direction client had previously planned to undertake.