Sports League Business Reference Architecture
Business Capability Maps, Value Streams, and Strategy Maps for Sports Leagues.
- Sports leadership requires a unified and validated view of sports leagues business capabilities that help CIOs and sports leadership accelerate the strategy design process and that aligns initiatives, investments, and strategy.
- The business and IT often focus on a project, ignoring the holistic impact and value of an overarching value stream and business capability view.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central, and has many benefits, to organizational priorities. It’s critical to understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and the direction of the organization, but more significantly, to enabling measurable top-line organizational outcomes and the unlocking of direct value.
Impact and Result
- Demonstrate the value of IT’s role in supporting your sport's organizations capabilities while highlighting the importance of proper alignment between organizational and IT strategies.
- Apply reference architecture techniques such as strategy maps, value streams, and capability maps to design usable and accurate blueprints of your sports league operations.
- Assess your initiatives and priorities to determine if you are investing in the right capabilities. Conduct capability assessments to identify opportunities and to prioritize projects.
Sports League Business Reference Architecture Guide
Business Capability Maps, Value Streams, and Strategy Maps for Sports Leagues
Analyst Perspective
In the age of disruption, IT must end misalignment and enable value realization.
A business reference architecture is used in a variety of strategic planning initiatives and connects strategy to execution in a manner that is accurate and traceable and promotes the efficient use of organizational resources.
An industry business reference architecture helps accelerate your strategy design process and enhances IT’s ability to align people, process, and technology with key business goals, outcomes, and initiatives.
Using an industry specific reference architecture is central, and has many benefits, to organizational priorities. It’s critical to understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and the direction of the enterprise.
Sports Leagues that leverage a validated view of their business capabilities that aligns initiatives, investments, and strategy are able to realize measurable top line business outcomes and the unlocking of direct and indirect value.
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Elizabeth Silva
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Executive Summary
Your Challenge
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Common Obstacles
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Info-Tech’s Approach
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Info-Tech Insight
Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central, and has many benefits, to organizational priorities. It’s critical to understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and the direction of the organization, but more significantly, to enabling measurable top-line organizational outcomes and the unlocking of direct value.
Reference Architecture Framework
Overarching Insight
Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central and has many benefits to organizational priorities. It's critical to understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and the direction of the enterprise, and more significantly, to enabling measurable top-line business outcomes and the unlocking of direct value.
Determine your organizational priority.
Many organizational priorities are dependent on an understanding of how the organization creates value and the organization's capabilities and processes.
Examine organizational opportunities through the lens of business, information/data, applications & technology.
Your understanding of your organization's business capabilities, processes (rules & logic), information/data, and architecture will identify organizational opportunities to create value through reduced costs or increased revenues and services.
Follow Info-Tech's methodology to enable organizational outcomes and unlock direct value.
Your approach indicates the scope of your modernization initiatives.
Build your organization's capability map by defining the organization's value stream and validating the industry reference architecture.
Use business capabilities to define strategic focus by defining the organization's key capabilities and developing a prioritized strategy map.
Assess key capabilities for planning priorities through a review of business processes, information, applications, and technology support of key capabilities.
Sustain capability-based strategy planning through ongoing identification and roadmapping of capability gaps.
Industry Overview: Sports LeaguesSports leagues within North America and APAC are essentially the “master company” of the various teams, known as franchises. Franchises are only able to operate under their respective leagues, therefore teams do not play games against those within other leagues. North American and APAC leagues are organized in a closed league system. Formula One has also been described to be a closed league. Closed league sports are sometimes considered a form of sport monopoly where value appropriation is present. Value appropriation is "related to advertising activities, which aim to capture value by improving competence in offering existing products or services." (Heldt, 2021) Sports leagues with Europe act as a governing body that clubs (teams) of all levels belong to. Clubs are promoted to different leagues or divisions within the European system based on high- or poor-quality performance. Clubs are also able to play matches inside and outside of the league. European leagues are organized in an open league system where value creation is present. Value creation is "related to new product development and research and development activities, which aim to create superior value for fans by developing products or services.“ (Heldt, 2021)  Figure above: Value Stream for Sports Leagues |
Sports Leagues, Franchises & Clubs
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Differences in closed and open sport leagues
| Closed League (NA & APAC) | Open League (Europe) | |
| League System |
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| League Functions |
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| Competition Between Teams/Clubs |
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| Competition Between Leagues |
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| Player Market |
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| Revenue Sharing |
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| Competition Policy |
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Business Value Realization
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Business value defines the success criteria of an organization as manifested through organizational goals and outcomes, and it is interpreted from four perspectives:
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Business Value Matrix
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Value, goals, and outcomes cannot be achieved without business capabilities
Break down your business goals into strategic and achievable initiatives focused on specific value streams and business capabilities.
Sports League Business Capability Map
Business capability map defined…
In business architecture, the primary view of an organization is known as a business capability map.
A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation, rather than how. Business capabilities:
- Represent stable business functions.
- Are unique and independent of each other.
- Typically will have a defined business outcome.
A business capability map provides details that help the business architecture practitioner direct attention to a specific area of the business for further assessment.
Info-Tech Insight
Open and closed leagues may create value differently; however, the value streams, chains, and capabilities that create value remain the same, as the execution of those capabilities is what's different.
Glossary of Key Concepts
A business reference architecture consists of a set of models to provide clarity and actionable insight and value. Typical techniques and terms used in developing these models are:
| Term/Concept | Definition |
| Industry Value Chain | A high-level analysis of how the industry creates value for the consumer as an overall end-to-end process. |
| Business Capability Map | The primary visual representation of the organization’s key capabilities. This model forms the basis of strategic planning discussions. |
| Industry Value Streams | The specific set of activities an industry player undertakes to create and capture value for and from the end consumer. |
| Strategic Objectives | A set of standard strategic objectives that most industry players will feature in their corporate plans. |
| Industry Strategy Map | A visualization of the alignment between the organization’s strategic direction and its key capabilities. |
| Capability Assessments | Based on people, process, information, and technology, a heat-mapping effort that analyzes the strength of each key capability. |
| Capability | An ability that an organization, person, or system possesses. Capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and typically require a combination of organization, people, processes, and technology to achieve. |
Tools and templates to compile and communicate your reference architecture work
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The Sports League Business Reference Architecture Template is a place for you to collect all of the activity outputs and outcomes you’ve completed for use in next steps.
Download the Sports League Business Reference Architecture Template |
Info-Tech’s methodology for reference architecture
| 1. Build your organization’s capability map | 2. Use business capabilities to define strategic focus | 3. Assess key capabilities for planning priorities | 4. Adopt capability-based strategy planning | |
| Phase Steps |
1.1 Define the Organization’s Value Stream 1.2 Develop a Business Capability Map |
2.1 Define the Organization's Key Capabilities 2.2 Develop a Strategy Map |
3.1 Business Process Review 3.2 Information Assessment 3.3 Technology Opportunity Identification |
4.1 Consolidate and Prioritize Capability Gaps |
| Phase Outcomes |
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Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs
DIY Toolkit |
Guided Implementation |
Workshop |
Consulting |
| "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful." | "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track." | "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place." | "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project." |
Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options
Guided Implementation
A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.
A typical GI is between 6 to 9 calls over the course of 1 to 4 months.
What does a typical GI on this topic look like?
Phase 1 |
Phase 2 |
Phase 3 |
Phase 4 |
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| Call #1: Introduce Info-Tech’s Industry reference architecture methodology. | Call #2: Define and create value streams.
Call #3: Model level 1 business capability maps. |
Call #4: Map value streams to business capabilities. | Call #5: Create a strategy map.
Call #6: Introduce Info-Tech's capability assessment framework. |
Call #7: Review capability assessment map(s).
Call #8: Discuss and review prioritization of key capability gaps and plan next steps. |
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