Racing Digital Update

Racing Digital Blog 1

Our story so far…..Following the creation of Racing Digital in July 2021, we spent our first few months bringing our new teams up to speed and undergoing a Discovery Research phase. This gave us a good understanding of how things are now, identify what works well (and what doesn’t), as well as discovering key questions, ideas, and opportunities. 

This phase enabled us to map out the scope of our work and create our delivery roadmap, planning when we will research, design, develop and implement each part of the project.

The discovery phase, which some of you were directly involved in, saw us engaging extensively with trainers, owners, racecourses and industry teams via workshops, video meetings, interviews, phone calls, and yard and raceday visits. We created a series of surveys, prototypes, quick polls, and proof of concept examples to demo our initial thinking and hear early feedback.

What have we found?

Our research has identified some key focus areas. 

There are “big questions” that we must answer to determine the direction of our approach and challenge current processes or ways of doing things. 

We uncovered huge opportunities across all areas. Interestingly, we found some opportunities only require small improvements to current processes, but when delivered together have the potential to provide huge benefits.

We have core principles to adhere to that guide us to transform your digital interaction with and management of horseracing. Providing data to the industry to help people make informed decisions, automating processes and removing the need for manual intervention will enable faster publishing of information,  improve communication with our participants through the most useful methods and via multiple platforms.

As an example, we are working on ensuring that the attributes of races are set up in a way that will ensure, where possible, only horses that are qualified can be entered into races, significantly improving the journey finding suitable races and entering horses. 

We are also focused on reducing the time and duplication of effort spent on entering information and administrative tasks. The system should be able to use the information already input and only ask for additional inputs where necessary to help you make good decisions, understand where you are in a process or be alerted to what to do next. This smarter way of working will benefit everyone.

What’s our plan?

Since the conclusion of our discovery phase, we have been working hard to define the project roadmap. This will help us to plan and share the order which we will approach each area. 

We have core project areas that include fixture and race planning, people and horse management (including ownership and licensing processes), entries and declarations, results and post-race processes, financial management and race day activities.

Our initial focus and the first aspects to be developed have been in the fixture and race planning area which is now live and racecourses and stakeholders will be using the new system via the Racing Digital Hub for determination of the 2023 fixture list. 

The next project stage will be the research and design phases for ownership registration and administration, before moving on to trainer specific areas of licensing, yard management and horse administration. We aim to transform the ownership journey and substantially improve customer experience. This will also be reflected in how trainers and secretaries are involved in and support owner processes, to make it simpler, more relevant and ultimately more user friendly. 

How can you get involved?

As part of our research phases, we will be setting up customer research panels to engage with frequently and help us with feedback on our ideas and design suggestions. If this sounds interesting to you, please look out for further updates from us about how to join in. 

Alternatively, if you are limited on time but would like to be involved or have something you’d like to discuss then do get in touch with us directly. 

Also, don’t forget if you think of anything whilst you’re working that you find frustrating, could be done better or currently works well, please tell us! 

You can contact us via email at ideas@racingdigital.co.uk