A tech strategy that needs to be ahead of its time
Laying an expansive foundation for technology to enable the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games
The situation
Picture the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games (LA28 Games), and what do you see? Chances are, it’s people—athletes, fans, supporters—coming together to witness incredible human athleticism on the world’s biggest stage. But behind the eagerly anticipated event will be a massive technology infrastructure enabling the Games. It’s an exceptional feat of human ingenuity, executed on a similarly massive scale.
LA28 had been conceived as “a new Games for a new era,” and even before Los Angeles was confirmed as host city on September 13, 2017, leaders aspired to deliver one of the most innovative and technologically advanced sporting events to date. The 11-year runway was unprecedented.
Four years later, in the summer of 2021, the LA28 Organizing Committee was still operating with a small staff, but its ambition remained huge. Leaders wrestled with questions that, from a tech standpoint, were challenging to answer: How is technology anticipated to evolve in the next seven years? Will what’s innovative today feel like yesterday’s news in 2028? To successfully plan an event of this massive scale, how could LA28 explore what’s possible without moving too far from what’s predictable? LA28 leaders needed a clear vision and overall strategy that could be foundational to how they moved forward with potential talent, sponsors, and collaborators.
Seven years can feel like a marathon…or a sprint.
The solve
Every Olympic and Paralympic Games is unique and gets built, essentially, from the ground up. Deloitte had worked with other Organizing Committees in the past, and we had deep experience helping a wide variety of businesses build customized technology architectures. We felt confident we could help LA28 lay a strong foundation for platforms and systems that could support delivery of a technologically advanced event the whole world would be watching.
We started by talking with key LA28 stakeholders and surveying more than 800 others—including fans, athletes, staff, and Angelenos—to develop personas and journey maps. These would serve as a guiding light for a master plan around how technology could meet the needs of anticipated end users.
Together with LA28, we considered transformative innovations that might inspire groundbreaking new experiences and identified proven, leading-edge solutions that help facilitate events of this scale. Deloitte futurists shared informed viewpoints around emerging technologies that may be widely adopted by 2028, and Deloitte’s Sports practice leveraged its industry experience to help deepen LA28 leadership’s understanding of the commercial opportunities. A Deloitte Greenhouse Lab, tailored for LA28, helped drive consensus and further define the technology vision.
With Deloitte’s Tech Strategy team leading the charge, LA28 staff came away with a technology vision statement they could use as they began engaging with sponsors, mapping capabilities, and engineering a future-state architecture. We complemented that with a multiyear roadmap encompassing technology services across governance, integration, enterprise functions, digital engagement, sales and customer care, marketing, advertising, analytics, data, infrastructure and more. By segmenting the “technology” category, we believed LA28 could unlock potential opportunities for new collaborations and drive business value.
Since the chief technology officer role traditionally isn’t filled seven years before the Games, Deloitte’s experience and insights helped inform the technology function in these early days of the journey. Now, as the function has matured, LA28 is well-positioned for an innovative technology journey and better equipped to identify potential collaborators to help drive it.
Exploring what’s possible so LA28 can run with what’s proven
The impact
Together, with LA28, we translated user personas and journey maps into capability maps and architecture. And now, LA28 is using those tools to build a frictionless, integrated ecosystem designed to deliver a memorable and unparalleled experience enabled by technology. The architecture has unlocked new opportunities beyond the traditional tech ecosystem and has helped influence LA28’s sponsorship strategy.
Deloitte helped LA28 build an overall technology strategy inclusive of cloud, enterprise resource planning, sales & customer care, marketing, advertising, and cybersecurity. And as a result, it’s a strategy that’s poised to impact all LA28 stakeholders in some way.
Sports are inherently unpredictable. The technology behind sports can’t be.
