SF Giants CIO: Bill Schlough

Dan Farber: Bill Thanks for joining me

Bill Schlough: Thanks for having me, Dan.

Dan Farber: Well, we're here at AT&T Park, in the press box, at the home of the San Francisco Giants. For starters, you've got a baseball park, you've got players, you've got operations. How do you divide up your role as CIO?

Bill Schlough: It's a good question. I would say that really it's relatively evenly split. You know the baseball side is on the field competition and we focus a good portion of our time trying to use technology to create a competitive advantage on the field. So you see baseball is one side. Beyond that, the ballpark and the rest of our operations I really consider business operations. We own this ballpark which is relatively unique in baseball and when we built AT&T Park, it was the first privately financed facility in baseball since Dodger Stadium many years before. And so it really divided up as the baseball side, on the field competition, using technology to improve the performance of our players, and then business operations, which is more using technology to drive revenues and help us put those players on the field.

Dan Farber: Well let's talk about the park itself and it seems to be a lot of innovations around this baseball field and starting off with you've just installed a new 103 foot by 31 and a half foot HD screen, that's right behind us right now, but what's interesting to me is not just that its HD but the kind of information you're going to be putting on that screen.

Bill Schlough: Yeah. We're extremely excited about this year's big innovation which was actually our largest capital investment in the ballpark since we built it back for the 2000 season. There's two pieces to it. One is the information and two is the quality of the image. And we really focused heavily on the quality of the image. The board itself as you stated is in the 3 million dollar range and that's been publicized but what hasn't been publicized as much is that in order to be able to deliver the content of that board. It's just like having a high def TV at home. You can buy a nice plasma screen but if you don't pay for the high def cable service through DIRECTV or Comcast, you're just showing a standard def image on a big board. So many ballparks even still today new facilities have put in these big boards but have not invested in infrastructure behind the scenes to be able to deliver high def. So we put in a high def production room, an edit studio, we increased our staff, we put in high def cameras throughout the ballpark, all of that investment exceeded the cost of the board itself, in order to be able to deliver eye-popping high definition content on that board. That's piece one. Piece two like you said is the information. We want to showcase the high def video content as much as we can and go with it is a 32 by 9 board so we can show side by side 16 by 9 high def images but our standard look is a lineup on each side, home and visitor, with a high def image in the middle, that we can drop in those additional statistics and information and slide that in for the fans as we see fit.

Dan Farber: Now one of the other aspects of this ballpark is that in 2004 you put in WiFi access. So it has been a few years. What kind of usage are you seeing?

Bill Schlough: Well when we did that, we put in a hundred and twenty three 802.11b access points.

Dan Farber: And that's across this what is it 1 million square feet?

Bill Schlough: That's about right, about a million square feet and when we did it, it was one of the largest WiFi installations in the world. And because the way the ballpark is leveled, with you know 5 different levels through the ballpark and because we can have a concentration of 40 thousand fans here who possibly could all be trying to access the WiFi network at once, we had to deploy all these access points throughout to ensure that we had coverage from the cove out there, the boats that are in the cove all the way to folks who may be out in Willie Mays plaza pre-game to any seat in the ballpark.

Dan Farber: Now what's the purpose of having WiFi here if what people are going to do, if you're getting all that information on the scoreboards and the other screens, so people need to check their email during the game?

Bill Schlough: We are very proud of the fact that we have been able to make this free to our fans but it's not something that we've put here just as a wow factor. What we are really trying to do here is not force technology on our fans. WiFi is the perfect technology. It's a bring your own technology. When we built this ballpark we though about all kinds of technology bells and whistles, including smart seats where you would have a monitor in each seat and you could pull up whatever you want. You could order food, you could access the internet. The beauty of WiFi is there are some fans who are really turned off by that, they don't have to use the WiFi. The WiFi is bring your own. If you want to bring your own handheld or laptop, you can leverage that WiFi network and we've built a portal to direct fans to content that we think enhances their experience at the game. You know, video highlights, information about the food and beverages, the restrooms, other things here at this ballpark, all kinds of statistical information, which you could find on the internet but we make it easy for them right here through a portal at the website. But if they're here and they're playing hooky, that's fine too, they can access the internet, they can access their email but so we don't force anything on anyone. WiFi enables our fans to come to the ballpark and experience it the way they want to experience it.

Dan Farber: Do you envision a future in which the fan experience is more walletless where wherever you are in the park if you have to pay for something, order food, somehow it's automated and there are kiosks or you can do it from your seat. I mean you are saying that most people may not want to do it that way but do you think inevitably it kinda goes in that direction just as Jet Blue puts a screen on every seat?

Bill Schlough: I do. I do see that it's really just a matter of how long does it take. And it's a vision that we've had here since 2002. I took a trip to a facility. I try to travel and look at other facilities within the US as well as internationally to get ideas and I really had a revolutionary experience where I visited a facility called Arena auf Shalke in Germany and that facility was built as a cashless facility. They take no cash in the facility whatsoever. Now if you build a facility that way, that's one thing. But to try to retrofit a facility is a lot more challenging, because people are used to being able to bring cash. If someone came in, ‘what do you mean you don't take cash here?' So to me cashless, our vision that we've talked about sometimes is a cashless, ticketless ballpark. That's step one. What you're talking about is a complete walletless ballpark and I think you could get there too. We want to get to cashless, ticketless first. So cashless, we've taken some steps to do that embracing Visa's new contactless RF technology where we've upgraded, going into this season we've upgraded all of our fixed, by the all-star break we will have all of our fixed concession stands with customer facing contactless credit readers credit card terminals. Now there is a little chicken and egg thing there. Most of our fans don't have contactless cards yet. But when they do they won't be walletless but you won't even need to pull anything out of your wallet. You can wave your wallet over the contactless readers and you will be good to go. So that's step 1. The future, you might look at biometric technology and we've talked to some of those folks. We're not there yet. But you know step 1 for us is go cashless go ticketless, so you need your wallet but you don't need to worry about the ticket anymore, you don't need to worry about cash, just bring the wallet and then maybe ultimately all you need is your finger.

Dan Farber: Speaking of tickets, you have developed systems around tickets where customers can buy tickets online but not only that they can exchange tickets or put them up for sales so that seems like a pretty good innovation in the sense that you know people who buy season tickets can basically barter them online.

Bill Schlough: Absolutely, and for us it was crucial if you rewind to when we built this ballpark going to 2000, we were coming out of Candlestick and we knew we were going to be in a sold out situation here everyday; where season tickets, no more partial plans here, you're a full season ticket holder or a single game buyer. And we were limited by the size of our ballpark, 40,000 seats, we could only have 28,000 season ticket holders. We had to save 12,000 because in a marquee game, like a world series or an all-star game, those 12,000 need to be allocated to the league and the other team. So we sold out 28,000 season tickets but none of those fans, very few are gonna go to all 81 games so we had to make it easy for them and to avoid leaving a good portion of those tickets in the drawer at the end of the year. We want to make it easy for them to get rid of those tickets so going into the 2000 season there was no online secondary market. There was no StubHub back in 2000. So we created the first online secondary market in all of the entertainment business. And it was a big risk because most facilities were worried about cannibalization of your single game sales but for us its far more important to take care of our best customers, our season ticket holders, even if it causes us to lose some single game sales, we'd rather allow our season ticket holders to resell those tickets. So we created that business in 2000 and now it's a multibillion dollar business that is virtually every sports team, many concerts, etcetera, embrace this online secondary market. We call it the double play ticket window. We resell over 100,000 tickets for our best customers every year putting over 5 million dollars back into their pockets so that they are more likely to come back to us next year. And as you've said also, we've created our ticket relay system which makes it just as easy for them to instead of sell that ticket, send it to their friend or uncle so they don't have to meet out at the Willie Mays statue and pass off a ticket.

Dan Farber: Done that a few times. Now you talk about IT as a competitive advantage and certainly on the field that's an important issue; so how are you using technology on the field for the players, coaches.

Bill Schlough: On the field really there' two areas you can divide. You have player development, improving the performance of the athletes we have today and you have scouting which is evaluating potential additions to the team. So if you look at the player development side, and really we have systems that support both sides. On the player development side, going into the 2000 season, and this is rewinding quite a ways, but going into 2000, pretty much every team in baseball on the video side used VHS recorders to tape their players, they would fast forward and rewind, and freeze frame, and slow mo to take a look at their specific wind-up or their pitching motion or batting motion. Going into 2000, we were one of the first teams to take the step of going all-digital with that. So 2000, seven years ago, we put in a four terabyte DVD jukebox system, huge investment back then. But technology has moved on a long way since then; so in year one, we had a system here at our home park to be able to evaluate our players and improve their performance. Fast forward to 2007, that system now, the DVD jukebox, was sold on Craig's List, it's now in someone's living room, with DVDs of their own on it; but for us it's all hard disk storage.

Dan Farber: You didn't go along with all that data

Bill Schlough: No we didn't let them have the data, but they took the jukebox, empty jukebox. And so now we have a storage area network that handles all that data. We're closer to 20 terabytes, from 5 terabytes now, and compression technology has improved so much, that the video quality is significantly enhanced. That system is here for our home park. We use that system to manage information from our minor league teams as well. We take a version of that system on the road with us as do many teams as well at this stage. So it's evolved quite a bit but for us staying one step ahead of the competition is the secret and so each year we try to evolve that system further on the video side. So that's one side, that's really the player development aspect. On the scouting side, we've developed an in-house system which we feel gives us a competitive advantage in terms of assessing talent at the amateur level, at the minor league level, scouting

Dan Farber: What's that system made up of? Is it basically a database and putting in the data?

Bill Schlough: Yeah. It's a local database with information that is populated by our scouts who are on the road or minor league coaches and all that feeds into a database central here and our baseball operations staff is able to tap into that and report on it as they see fit and made decisions in terms of the amateur draft that comes up as well as when it comes close to trade deadline evaluating acquisitions and that type of thing. So what we do here is no different from any other team. Every team does these types of things. We have multiple systems but our scouting system is more focused on equipping the General Manager with the information he needs to make the right player transaction moves. At the same time, our video system is more focused on aiding the players and coaches in tweaking their approach to the games so that they are able to assess how a pitcher is likely to pitch them coming to a game, by looking at previous videos of how that pitcher has pitched in recent games or how that pitcher may have pitched against them in recent games where not only who should go to the plate but when that player goes to the plate, Richard really goes to the plate, you know, how is Randy Johnson going to pitch him. Well Rich, thanks to the video coaching system has the opportunity to look at how Randy Johnson fared in his last couple outings and he's able to look at how Randy has pitched Richard lately in the past. And it can be information overload. Every player has a different tolerance for how much they want to use this. Some players love to be in front of the video system and the coaches have to pull them away, we need to actually work on this in the field. Others, coaches needs to drag them in and say lets look at the analytics here a little bit and think about it. So every player has a different tolerance level. Is it real time? You know it can be for the players during the game. But for the coach, I'd say most coaches are really, it's not a real time thing. They do their homework, they do their research. During the game, all that is in their head, but they making their decisions more based on feel.

Dan Farber: Having a computer as opposed to chewing tobacco is not part of the dugout culture?

Bill Schlough: Not today. Computers are not a part of the dugout culture today. Could that change over time? You know, it's possible. Everything evolves over time but really I'd say its not culturally acceptable for coaches to be walking around with tablet PCs in the dugout today.

Dan Farber: Bill, thank you very much for speaking with me.

Bill Schlough: My pleasure, Dan.

Dan Farber: I've been speaking with Bill Schlough who is the CIO of the San Francisco Giants. For CIO Sessions, I'm Dan Farber. Thanks for watching.