The Challenge

England and GB Hockey is a large organisation which is spread throughout the UK and its technology needs are wide ranging. The challenge the organisation faced was to efficiently and securely meet the needs of 80 staff, around 30 sponsors, suppliers and partners and thousands of volunteers across the country.

The Solution

O2 has played a pivotal role in supporting England and GB Hockey by deploying technology to aid communication with coaches and players while travelling across the UK as well as abroad. And by helping video analysts to work closely with players in training, and as well as staff working with clubs and schools.

Mobile data has been an essential element in making the organisation a very connected one. With 140,000 people playing each, there are many matches which need to be recorded and managed. O2 has enabled all match results to be sent in via mobile data, saving time and resource and streamlining the process significantly.

“IT security is absolutely critical to England Hockey, we retain huge amounts of data on our players, which we don’t want to fall into the hands of our competitors internationally, but also on a day to day basis, being able to manage our customer data.”

Improving and streamlining their data handling systems is crucial to ensure the strong relationships with everyone involved with the organisation is maintained, “coaches, participants, people that are running our clubs, they’ve got to trust us and trust what we do and security is absolutely key.”

Results

The support is from day to day and was even as far reaching as the Rio Olympics, “there’s lots of different examples of how O2 have enabled 4G wifi at our events, to handsets for our staff, sim cards at the Rio Olympic Games, lots of different ways, all of which add value to what we’re doing.”