“Faster, Higher, Stronger” is the Olympic motto. In a Keynote Lunch presentation at SAS Global Forum, Tim Patrick, Director of Enterprise Applications for the United States Olympic Committee, explained how technology, data analysis and visualization are helping fulfill that mission.

After a successful showing at the Vancouver games, Patrick and his team asked themselves what they could do to better leverage technology for the London 2012 games. Their ideas started on a white board, and nine months before the London games, Patrick pitched their plan to executives.

He told them, “We’re going to unite disparate systems and data in a single framework for analysis and visualization.”

This was no small feat, but Patrick knew it could be done.

They created a real-time pivot viewer that included a real-time Olympic data feed with 11 million XML messages. The US Olympic Committee was able to integrate this real-time Olympic data with data systems like HR, finance, facilities, and fundraising to answer questions like, “Which athletes that earned gold medals, stayed in our facilities, received grants, and with which coaches did they work?”

US Committee analysts used SAS dashboards to visually track the real-time Olympic feed to determine how US athletes were performing compared to other countries.

What’s next for the US Olympic Committee?
After Patrick explained how they were able to integrate their enterprise systems with the real-time Olympic feed, he made an announcement about their future data analysis and visualization plans: they will be using SAS Visual Analytics. He said, “For us to take all of that power and to put it out in the field with our sports performance analysts where things are happening with coaches and athletes is going to be profoundly powerful.”

Watch Patrick’s full presentation on the SAS Global Forum Live Stream channel.