Introduction
This week I’m joined by Charles Sims who is the Head of Technology for the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team.
In our discussion, Charles starts with what his day looks like as Head of Technology for an NBA basketball team. He talks about his experience working for Steve Ballmer and the incredible value he brings to the Clippers organization. Lastly, Charles discusses how they balance leveraging technology to enhance the fan experience while not taking away from the game.
Speaker Profiles
Charles Sims Twitter: https://twitter.com/CSimsLA
Charles Sims LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlessims/
Los Angeles Clippers: https://www.nba.com/clippers/
Audio File
Featured Hashtags
#CIO #Sports #NBA #FanExperince #CX #DigitalTransformation #CIOitk
Podcast Transcript
Tim Crawford 0:04
Tim, hello, and welcome to the CIO in the Know podcast, where I take a provocative but pragmatic look at the intersection between business and technology. I’m your host, Tim Crawford, a CIO and strategic advisor at Avoa. This week I’m joined by Charles Sims, who is the head of technology for the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. In our discussion, Charles starts with what his day looks like as head of technology for an NBA basketball team. He talks about his experience working for Steve Ballmer and the incredible value he brings to the Clippers organization. Lastly, Charles discusses how they balance leveraging technology to enhance the fan experience while not taking away from the game. Charles Sims, welcome to the program.
Charles Sims 0:50
Tim, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Tim Crawford 0:53
Charles, you are the head of technology for the Los Angeles Clippers.
Charles Sims 0:58
That’s correct.
Tim Crawford 0:59
So, why don’t we just kind of kick this off and level set folks that might be listening to the show as to who the LA Clippers are, assuming they don’t know, they should all know who the Clippers are, and your role there.
Charles Sims 1:14
Absolutely, so the LA Clippers are the best NBA team here in the West Coast, and hopefully the entire NBA – they’ve been around for many, many years ago. Originally came from Buffalo, New York, made a pit stop in San Diego, and then they’ve been here for about 20 years.
Tim Crawford 1:31
Wow, that’s great. You know, is the head of technology one of the things I could just imagine folks wondering is what does your day look like? I mean, you must work with some amazing folks, you must do some amazing things, being part of an NBA team. Maybe you can just kind of walk us through, like, what does a typical day look like for Charles Sims?
Charles Sims 1:54
So, a typical day is going to be there’s a decent bit of meetings, but the benefit of having a smaller team, such as the Clippers, where even though we’re a massive brand, we’re still only about 250 full-time employees, so you get to wear both a lot of hats, as well as you get to work with some of the best in the industry, who are here all for the same reason. They’re all trying to help the team win a championship, whether or not you’re on the business side or the basketball side, we’re all here for that one end goal. So, a lot of my days are going to be either navigating through your normal IT, which is enabling my team to make sure that all of our, all of our hardware and software is in line with what our strategy is. We’re continuously building what our support model is looking like, or we’re going to be building for game day technology support, so if it’s a game day, is going to be a different day for myself than a normal day, and then finally is going to be working with my internal product development team on any sort of products that we might be interacting with some of the other departments on for that specific day, so to kind of wrap up, it’s just a lot of meetings, then some strategic internal conversations, making sure my team set up interacting with my outsourced team in the morning, and then once again in the evening, and then wrapping up for the day.
Tim Crawford 3:11
Yeah, that sounds great. That’s got to be exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time, especially on game day.
Charles Sims 3:19
Yeah, it’s definitely one of those interesting experiences that I, I haven’t had for a while. So, I originally started out in the entertainment industry, and game day feels a lot like being on set. Yes, you have your normal corporate responsibilities, you still have meetings that you might have to go to for the normal side, but since our team has such a deep interaction with game day, and we’re setting up for game day. We’re making sure a lot of the activations in the arena are working, interacting with the basketball team, for whether it’s the technology on the bench, technology in the locker room, technology in the video room, all those different pieces. Things can go wrong, and as long as we’re staying on top of it and being agile and have a couple different backup solutions for things that don’t work, where we have a pretty smooth day, and what I like to say is, once we hit about a minute into the first quarter, everything kind of calms down, because once you’re there, it’s steady state, you’re just making sure that nothing blows up.
Tim Crawford 4:14
So that’s the magic time, one minute into the first quarter, you’re golden. That’s great, you know. You talk a little bit about your team, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about your boss, Steve Ballmer. How does Steve kind of play a role in with your role as head of technology? I mean, I have to believe that there is some, maybe some interaction, or you know, maybe not, depending on the place he plays within within the Clippers organization, too.
Charles Sims 4:44
Yeah, well, I like to say, I mean, I usually describe Steve with a word, and that’s just passionate. So he’s passionate about every vertical within the organization, and technology – it’s one of those that he comes from. Technology comes from one of the large. Most technological companies in the world with Microsoft, and he knows organizationally what works, what, and what the value of innovation is, what the value of continuously pushing the needle, not just kind of resting on your laurels throughout the entire year, and so even though Steve has never played a role in dictating we have to do this or we have to do that, he does put some trust in both our teams and the other teams around us that we know what we’re doing, but he also wants to be pushing innovation, so when he, when he gets involved, whether it’s in projects with myself or any of my teammates, it’s going to be making sure we’re pushing the needle. How do we keep, be, how do we keep moving towards that idea of how do we, how are we world-class, whether or not it’s pushing innovation within technology for the basketball operations or the business operations or marketing or normal, it like I remember one of the first things that when I first came into the organization and I was taking over an infrastructure that had no backup, and first thing that I wanted to do was, oh gosh, we have to start backing everything up, and there’s a conversation with Steve back then, says, no, I would rather push you harder to get everything to the cloud than to get a massive backup system just to get all this stuff backed up, and then give you the out to never move forward, so even though he’s not somebody who doesn’t believe in backup, it’s more of we don’t want to put these crutches in any of our technology verticals just to be able to rest on those, and so that helped us really align our vision of when I was first coming in, it’s let’s move as quickly as we can to be able to support this stuff and not keep relying on older tech deck to just these little band aid solutions to get there,
Tim Crawford 6:48
that’s amazing. I mean, passion is definitely, is definitely something that I would use to describe Steve over the decades that I’ve known him, so I can just imagine what those conversations must be like. I mean, how invigorating, how exciting that must be.
Charles Sims 7:06
Yeah, I mean, you look, you don’t have normally in your normal career, you’re not going to have somebody that has seen such valuable businesses in helping them figure out what their business plan is, or helping corporations completely change over their technical vision, like he did with Microsoft, and having that in a team like ours, as you, it feels like you get to glean off from some of that, but he also pushes you harder to be able to learn more things that he hadn’t necessarily gotten into yet, like what we’re doing with some of the AI and the ML within Azure, and stacks like that, there are newer technologies, and so it’s this nice back and forth where he pushes us to innovate, and then we bring back and try to get a gage on what’s falling correctly, what’s working, what, and what we need to push harder on,
Tim Crawford 7:52
but you also then have an executive that understands the value that technology brings to the table, and like you said with the backup example, I think that’s a, that’s a wonderful example of how he’s thinking ahead, he’s not just thinking about the short game, if you will, but thinking about the long game, you know, it’s not about just winning a quarter, it’s about winning a game, winning a championship, and it seems like he’s thinking about that long game more so than just what you might achieve in a very short period of time.
Charles Sims 8:24
Absolutely, and even in some of the solutions that have been proposed in the past, and I think I’ve learned the difference, the difference between just throwing money at technology, just throwing, oh, we got to get this solution that then we’re going to flip out in a year, in two years, having a lot more of that three to five year mind frame, and understanding that technology is changing so quickly, so we have to have very modular style infrastructure. We have to have very modular style software strategy, and I learned that before I came here. It was my entire goal with any company that we were consulting with was, how do we get you to the next 12 months? How do we get to you the next six months? How do we just get you up for this one project? And so, being able to start looking further and further out with understanding that software is changing so much is kind of cool. So, you’re playing a little bit of fortune teller, while also hedging your bets on which abstraction we need to focus on. Okay, do we really do we have to go as deep as we can into PaaS for some sort of database or some sort of application style, if we know that that’s going to change over in two to three years, or do we stay more at the IaaS level while a couple other pieces that we can feed into it, like say Cognitive Services or something like that, we can allow that PaaS to really push it forward, so I think that’s that’s been the one of the big learning lessons for me is how do we get into this POC style mode that we’re continuously iterating, but we can kill down technologies very quickly and not cost a lot towards our budget, while also these cornerstones, these foundation of technologies that we know are going to be lasting. Five or 10 years, we’re still focusing a lot of effort on,
Tim Crawford 10:03
you know, with technology, there’s a lot of change and a lot of opportunity that comes, but you also have to figure how you’re engaging your fans too, and they’re changing, and how they engage with the game is changing. Where is technology playing a role? You mentioned briefly earlier in the podcast, in the conversation, that it’s playing a role with the teams in the locker rooms and the bet at the bench, where else is technology kind of playing a role in how you’re looking at how to engage fans in the mix.
Charles Sims 10:34
Well, in the past, the way that you engage fans was either at game day, so in the arena, or it was on TV, and it was very high stakes. You had to make sure that the fan had the best time in the world, or you had to have a really deep marketing campaign, or however you wanted to really put your brand out on TV. But now the fan life cycle is so much larger, so now we’re interacting with fans when their favorite player gets traded into the team. We’re interacting with fans when they just come for their first NBA game, or potentially as a junior clipper, and going through our youth basketball program. We’re taking the approach of the brand equity is so much more valuable the wider that we’re trying to build the entire fan experience, rather than just games and just TV, because the product on the floor is always going to be a high-caliber product, but how do we increase the value of the all the experiences outside of that? And I think as we move into a new arena, we’re going to start seeing how much more we can interact with the fan in game, just in game day, that we haven’t been able to before. How do we interact with them on their Uber ride over or their Lyft ride home? How do we make sure that they know exactly where they want to get to in their seats, or how do they find the giveaways for that day, or they want to tweet to the Jumbotron? Like a lot of those type of what used to be more one-off interactions, how do we bring those into the entire life cycle, and see it as the fan 360 from the moment you’re even somewhat interested into us all the way until your 20 year season ticket holder,
Tim Crawford 12:11
and I would think that it goes beyond just the experience during game day and during the season, but even during the off season too, and how you, how you make these fans become fans for life, right? It’s not just about what’s happening on the floor, but it’s happening all around them too. Exactly.
Charles Sims 12:30
So, I’ve only been in the industry for four years now, but as I talked to a lot of the veterans who have been here for years, the thing that they said is it used to be there was an on season, and there was an off season, and off season was very, very like it was black and white, where as soon as the season is done, people can go, can go there, the marketing campaigns kind of spin down, digital wasn’t interacting with as much, they weren’t creating as much content, a lot of things like that, where now there’s no off season, our off season is continuously again building those communities, building those value-added interactions with our fans, because we want to, whether you’re a season ticket holder, a regular just fan, we want you to see more value than what you’re paying, we want to engage with you, whether it is through social media, whether it is through these shorts that our content team has been masterfully putting together both in season and off season, like we want to continue that story through the entire life cycle, that you’re interacting with us, that way you have, like, you feel that you’re part of the family, you feel that you are part of the team, and we need your help just as much as you want to interact with
Tim Crawford 13:38
us, you know, Charles, when we talk about technology as part of that interaction and building that fan experience. Where do you see emerging technologies play a role? You briefly touched on Azure, and of course, I think we would be remiss once again if we didn’t bring Microsoft into this because of the relationship with your boss, but where do the emerging technologies like cloud and artificial intelligence play a role. I mean, we see a lot about stats, we see a lot about just that, that quick responsiveness. Where do they fit in? Where are you fitting those in?
Charles Sims 14:14
So, right now, what you’re seeing, the majority of the AI, ML, or even some of the mixed reality, like AR, sorry, augmented reality, or virtual reality, you’re seeing those fringe or forward thinking technologies more on the fan engagement, so for example, our one of our platforms, Court Vision, which is an AI-enabled OTT platform that allows you to watch the game with overlays of stats and what’s going on, or being able to see how the plate, like it, learn how the plays are actually being drawn up for pick and rolls and ISOs and stuff like that, and that’s definitely one valuable piece. I think the next one that we’re really going to see is going to be around coaching. And statistics in real time, so about 20 years ago, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Moneyball, of course, Ball took Moneyball, took the idea of, okay, these metrics, these statistics, if we utilize those to to guide our decisions on players and who we should get to the original idea was around the salary cap, but then you started seeing it for in preparation for games, and so a few years back again, the team that was working with us on Court Vision Second Spectrum developed a product that is called Eagle, that is using the AI with the computer vision of, I think it’s like either 12 or 16 cameras in all 30 arenas to be watching the players and providing some statistics around the entire game, and so what that’s doing is that’s in preparation for pregame analysis and post game analysis. I think the next step that we’re going to see is going to definitely going to be real time analysis in game on the bench that is helping build the coach’s strategy to win throughout the entire time, and so that’s where I see a lot of our technologies moving, specifically in the AI and ML. Is how do you provide even more real-time instincts to the coaches on what plays they should be calling, how the other team is dissecting our either defense or offense, and things like that.
Tim Crawford 16:18
I’ve actually had the opportunity to see some of that technology in play, and I can’t place where it was I saw it, but it’s impressive. It’s really impressive to see where technology is fitting in to the NBA and into sports in general. Do you think we get to a point where, where technology could be overused, where we have to, we have to kind of think about a balance with this, and I think about, you know, the passion that Steve brings to it, and the passion that you bring to it, and thinking about how these new technologies play a role in making the game a better experience for both players, coaches, and fans, but do you think we go too far with technology, or have the potential to go too far.
Charles Sims 17:03
I would absolutely agree. I, we’re starting to see some of those concerns around data privacy, some of those concerns around how much the different facilities are able to interact with you, and our approach has always been we’re only there with technology to add value to the experience, we’re not there to try to manipulate, we’re not there to try to do anything that is in that realm of not feeling too good. If you found out, so we’re in, we’re extraordinarily open with everything that we’re interacting with you with, but I have seen some of the other experiences, not necessarily in NBA, but in some of the other sports, where as soon as you walk in, you feel like everything is just a constant banner, ad everything is a constant pop up or push, or just trying to get you to do specific actions. So, our goal is to never have technology overburden the actual game. To me, that’s the beauty of basket. Basketball can exist and be just as powerful in an 18,000 person stadium, everybody cheering on for the finals, all the way down to two people playing one on one on a blacktop off Compton. So I think the way that I would love to see technologies in the enhancement side to be as seamless and transparent as possible, and just, and just to make the game that much better. Then same would go for the statistics, like I was saying, around coaching and players. There’s only so much you’re going to be able to do to influence the game, so that’s where I say, like, the real-time strategies, that’s going to help out. But the players, they don’t have microchips in their head, they can’t, they can’t download it that quickly, so there’s, there’s still a massive element of coaching. That’s why a coach like ours is so valuable, with doc being able to truly have that almost like sixth sense of what’s going on with the players, what’s going on, some of those more personable touches that you have to have. So that’s where, even though I think there’s going to be a lot when it comes to analytics and AI and ML within sports, and there already is the one differentiator is you can’t necessarily put AI on a person,
Tim Crawford 19:14
right, but I think the point that you’ve made where technology should not and cannot overrun the game itself is really poignant, right. At the end of the day, all of this is to enhance the game, not replace the game
Charles Sims 19:31
exactly. And there’s been a lot of pieces where other teams are going to, they have apps that try to engage with you while you’re in the bowl, and I think one of our goals, especially when it comes to anything that is an app or fan interaction that’s digital, is not trying to take away from the game. We don’t want 18,000 fans watching our game while also watching their phone, like we don’t. We don’t want, how do we get away from the idea. The that we see at the school recitals with all the parents having 30 iPads up and phones up recording and not even enjoying the game itself, not even sorry, not even enjoying the performance or the ballerinas or anything like that. We want to make sure that when we are performing on the court that all eyes are glued towards that.
Tim Crawford 20:20
Yep, love that, love that. So, is we kind of think about what’s top of mind for you. If you think about what the things are that are top of mind that you’re looking forward to as part of the LA Clippers organization, what does that list look like?
Charles Sims 20:37
So, obviously the number one thing that I’d say is probably our progress towards the arena. I’m, I’m extraordinarily excited at the opportunity to be able to be part of the team to build one of the most technologically advanced arenas in the world. We’ve seen the differences of what the Warriors have done with Chase Center and what the Bucks have done in Milwaukee, and it’s amazing that you can change the community around with technology, as well as what we’re putting into the arena itself. So, I think there’s two pieces. I’m excited. I’m number one, excited to be able to start interacting with some of the local residents around there, and really pushing the value of technology and what it can do, but also be able to be part of the team that’s building the world-class arena that we would be doing,
Tim Crawford 21:25
that’s great. And then, as we kind of wrap on the episode, any top-level thoughts on what excites you most about being the head of technology in this day, in this time.
Charles Sims 21:37
Honestly, what’s exciting me the most right now is being able to have a team that is 100% dedicated towards getting it better. There’s not the normal politics I’ve seen in the past, especially with internal IT teams. So, I love the fact that every day I’m coming in, we’re solving solutions that are going to not only affect the internal employees but potentially affect our millions upon millions of fans, so that’s extraordinarily exciting that we get to make changes, we get to make improvements, we get to, we get to play with technologies that will touch many, many more people that we could ever have done in the past.
Tim Crawford 22:14
That’s great, that’s great. Charles Sims, thanks so much for joining on the program today.
Charles Sims 22:19
Thanks, Tim. I appreciate it.
Tim Crawford 22:23
For more information on the CIO in the No podcast series, visit us online at CIO itk.com or you can find us on iTunes, Google Play, and SoundCloud. Don’t forget to subscribe, and thank you for listening.
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