AP/ADMS 2511 – Management Information Systems
Summer 2020 Take-Home Final Examination
Read Case 12.1, Toronto Raptors Use Business Intelligence to Aim for a Winning Team, p. 330
The Problem
Toronto Raptors (www.nba.com/raptors), Canada’s only team in the National Basketball Association (NBA), have yet to win a championship since joining the league in 1995. Assembling a winning team requires getting the right players. With professional athletes making millions in annual salaries, teams need to make the right hiring decisions to ensure success both on and off the court, ice, diamond, or field. Making the wrong player decisions can cause a team owner’s bank account to go from the black to red in the blink of an eye. For years, the Toronto Raptors had mainly relied on a manual process to get new players. For example, the team used to print out player names in various colours for various categories and pin them to the wall. Managers would use the system for scouting, drafting, developing, and trading players. The paper-based nature of the process made it very difficult for managers to collaborate with each other. Raptors staff would also use Microsoft Excel as part of their manual player management process. Draft lists used to be scattered across Excel files and paper binders. Excel had its limits, however. For example, it was hard to use on mobile devices, could not be easily shared among team officials, and was hard to use to rank players.
The IT Solution
The solution came in the form of advanced analytics and data presentation using several wall-sized screens and touchscreen tables in a specially prepared room the team calls the “War Room.” The Raptors use software from IBM called Sports Insights Central (www-935.ibm.com/services/sports/), which uses IBM’s famous Watson artificial intelligence (as described in the closing case to Chapter 2). The Watson Tradeoff analytics function can assemble possible “dream team” player combinations. Watson Personality Insights gives management a better understanding of a player’s personality and how he might fit with other team members and the team culture. AlchemyAPI mines news databases for intelligence on players of interest. The software can also crunch a player’s potential athletic and financial performance to see what impact he might have on a team on and off the court. Sports Insights Central has a phone app so Raptors’ management can have their own mobile version of the War Room.
The Results
IBM Sports Insights Central has dramatically reduced paperwork for the Toronto Raptors. The new solution has automated and digitized a lot of the manual steps in the process of hunting for new players and the analyses that precede such decisions. Things that used to be stored in binders, such as the team’s scouting reports, trade scenarios, and player comparisons, are simultaneously displayed on screens. With the new solution, managers now have a centralized place to discuss and visualize the data and information necessary for them to make informed player hiring decisions, without having to give up parts of the old system. For example, IBM’s new system uses the same colour coding as the Raptors’ old paper-based system, so managers can see real-time data on familiar categories such as contract status. And the Raptors’ organization still uses the spreadsheets it knows and loves, but the new system makes them more dynamic and, most importantly, portable and shareable on mobile devices.

It is clear that the Toronto Raptors’ management did succeed in hiring an excellent team. In 2019 the Raptors made history by becoming the first Canadian team ever to win the NBA (North American Basketball Association) championship.

Additional information

Note that for grades to be awarded, case answers must be different for each question part of this examination. Part marks are not awarded. All components of a required for a grade need to be fully completed to receive a full mark.

Tip: Read all of the questions first, so that you can organize your work to avoid repetition.

Recall that good examples satisfy three characteristics. Each example needs to:
(i) link to the specified case using terms specific to the organization and functional area under discussion,
(ii) clearly illustrate the concept or theory being addressed or examined using an example and
(iii) differentiate from other examples, by being specific enough that this could not readily apply to other concepts or theories, i.e. provide enough information to illustrate WHY the example is relevant to the concept or theory being examined.

Review the new TIP sheet, How to stay within the page limit and build a good example, posted under both Session 6 and 13 of our class web site for additional information.

Required: (20 marks)

A. Provide an example of how the market pressure of globalization could affect the Toronto Raptors. (1 mark, Refer to Section 2.3)

B. Explain how the technology pressure of information overload affected management of the Toronto Raptors. (1 mark, Refer to Section 2.3)

C. Provide an example of how data governance could have helped the Toronto Raptors effectively implement its BI (business intelligence) systems. (1 mark, Refer to Section 5.1)