I D C

C U S T O M E R

S P O T L I G H T

Experimentation, Innovation, Sustainability:

Driven by Cloud Analytics and Data
Management
June 2016
Sponsored by IBM

Introduction
Denmark's Roskilde Music Festival is Northern Europe's
largest and most famous music and cultural event. All profits
from the festival, which has been run by the Roskilde Festival
Charity Society since 1971, go to support humanitarian and
cultural causes. The nonprofit festival draws around 130,000
music lovers annually to enjoy performances by 175 top
bands playing on multiple stages during the eight-day
gathering. It takes place in the fields south of the town of
Roskilde, where concertgoers camp out in an enormous and
temporary "tent city." During the festival, the inhabitants of
this mini-metropolis buy and consume approximately 200
tons of food and generate 300 tons of waste.
Festival organizers task an all-volunteer staff with the
challenge of running the event in an entertaining, safe, and
sustainable manner while delivering exceptional customer
experience to the guests. To support decision making,
festival organizers needed insights from the data generated
at the festival. Enter Per stergaard Jacobsen, external
lecturer at Copenhagen Business School (CBS).

Solution Snapshot
Organization: Denmark's Roskilde
Music Festival is Northern Europe's
largest cultural and music festival. The
eight-day event, run by the nonprofit
Roskilde Festival Charity Society, hosts
around 130,000 visitors annually.
Operational challenge: Mining
valuable insights from volumes of
real-time data to enhance planning and
running the festival.
Solutions: IBM technologies employed
on this project include IBM Bluemix,
IBM dashDB, IBM SPSS Modeler, and
IBM Watson Analytics.
Project duration: The ongoing
multiyear project began in 2013 and
will end in 2018.

Benefit: Faster insights for strategic,

Inspired by the Rio 2012 sustainability conference,
operational, and tactical decisions,
Jacobsen and Professor Esben Rahbek Gjerdrum
enabled by a flexible, scalable, cloudPedersen of CBS' Centre for Corporate Social
based analytics and data management
Responsibility sought to test sustainability initiatives in a
platform.
live environment. Recognizing that the festival offered a
real-time platform to study both environmental and
business model sustainability issues (in public safety; food,
energy, and water consumption; and waste management),
the CBS team approached Roskilde with a proposal to
collect festival data to uncover insights to enhance its planning and operations. A key goal would be
to aggregate the vast quantities of data collected ticket, food, and beverage sales; weather
reports; crowd movements; and thousands of customer interviews and mine the data for insights to
help organizers make smarter planning decisions and to provide a superior experience for
festivalgoers in terms of safety and services. Influencing guests to act sustainably also was important.

US41334116

Ultimately, the project's overarching goal is to develop sustainable business models for urban
environments. However, the valuable best practices uncovered by such cutting-edge data and
analytics work from the academic community can also be applied by companies of all sizes, from
start-ups to large enterprises.

The Solution
Called Rio to Roskilde, the data and analytics project kicked off in 2014 with preliminary research and
interviews; the multiyear project will build upon new sets of data from each year's festival. However,
the team quickly realized that collecting and analyzing structured and unstructured data from multiple
sources at the festival required a technology partner with analytics and data management
experience. "When we started this project, we were a little bit nave," said Jacobsen. "We thought we
would just collect some data on our servers. As we were getting into the project, we saw that, given
the volume and variety of the data, it couldn't be done without outside help."
Discussions with three technology vendors ensued, and IBM emerged as the best fit because of its
portfolio of cloud and analytics solutions and experience with urban sustainability through its Smarter
Cities consulting practice. To run such a complex project successfully requires a team with diverse
skill sets. The 25-person CBS team consists of academics and graduate students from
IT management, operations, and marketing disciplines, as well as undergraduates from Danish
Technical University and Munich University. Team members possess skills in data science, business
analytics, and social media analytics. IBM provided five specialists with critical data science and
Big Data experience to lend their expertise to the team.
For the 2015 festival, CBS launched the project to collect baseline information about how many
guests visited each concert as well as their length of stay and the performances they attended to
understand how crowd movement impacts safety, services, and other festival operations. CBS also
wanted to explore food consumption, energy usage, and waste creation trends. To accomplish these
tasks, IBM worked with CBS to roll out a data and analytics laboratory in under a day. The lab uses a
cloud-based analytics environment running on IBM Bluemix to capture and analyze data flows from
ticket and food sales, weather reports, social media feeds, and an opt-in mobile app. The solution can
collect, process, and store vast amounts of structured and unstructured data that the team can
analyze. Jacobsen was impressed with the solution's quick setup and ability to scale as data volumes
grew. Noted Jacobsen, "One day we had a room with chairs; the next day we had a full cloud-based
data laboratory. IBM handled it very smoothly."

Technologies
The CBS team employs several IBM solutions hosted on the IBM Bluemix platform designed to help
users select actions that improve business outcomes, including:

dashDB, a fully managed cloud data warehouse

Watson Analytics, an analytics tool that provides visual data exploration using a range of
structured and unstructured data analysis techniques

SPSS Modeler, a predictive analytics platform for building and deploying predictive models

dashDB was used as the primary data management software; SPSS was the primary data
preparation and analytic model development tool for the business analysts on the project; and
Watson Analytics was used to explore and visualize the information. The nontechnical analysts all
used Watson Analytics. All the solutions run on the IBM cloud platform hosted in datacenters in
Amsterdam and London to comply with EU data and privacy regulations.

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Jacobsen and his team found IBM's solutions adaptable and easy to use. For example, after only
three hours of individual training and a two-hour team session at the festival, business students were
up and running on Watson Analytics. They were able to quickly find correlations as well as causal
relationships among data.
In addition to the IBM solutions, CBS developed its own software for analyzing data from social media
(Facebook, Twitter, and others).

Services
The CBS team collected data about festival crowd movements via a real-time mobile app to create
predictive models that will aid in running the festival. Concertgoers could download the mobile app to
their smartphones. Most opted in to be anonymously monitored only a few hundred did not. The app
pinged opted-in smartphones every two minutes to plot their movements. This mobile device data was
used to correlate crowd movements to specific performances, time of day, weather, and other factors
and was visualized using thermal maps that identified "hot spots" showing congestion, popular
performances, or service and security needs. The team's analysis of the data revealed valuable insights
about crowd movements for use in planning future festivals and for potential real-time, tactical decisions
and attendee notification. For example, in times of rain, analytics can drive notifications to the festival app
for attendees to avoid most muddy areas. Analysis around food and beverage consumption linked to
weather conditions helps vendors minimize waste. Identifying popular performances lets security adjust
resources. These are just a few of the potential applications that the CBS team and Roskilde festival
expect to employ in 2016 and beyond.
In addition to behavioral data, the team was able to analyze demographic, attitudinal, and
transactional data collected through 12,000 face-to-face interviews, ticket sales, and other
observations to answer a range of tactical and strategic questions from the festival organizers.
Last year the students had to manually transcribe the interviews; this year interviewers will use iPads
with a connection to IBM's cloud solutions for more automated capture and analysis of textual data.
After the 2015 festival ended, the CBS team met with the festival's management team in a half-day
workshop to present the project's preliminary learnings. For 2016, Roskilde has a four-page wish list
of questions for the CBS team to follow up and plans are already in place to address all but one of
these questions. The big themes for this summer's festival are crowd security, sustainability, and
visualizing the data in real time. The team will also gather and analyze more festival data this year
and continue to test the predictive algorithms created from the 2015 event. "We also hope to have
sensor data [e.g., from trash bins, electricity, and water meters] that can provide insight on a number
of environmental factors," said Jacobsen. He added that plans to use real-time technology such as
IBM Streams to capture geospatial data and data from social media are also in the works for 2016.

Challenges
Perhaps the primary challenge for Jacobsen's team was managing the sheer volume and variety of
data pouring in during the 2015 festival. For example, the mobile app alone generated more than 91
million tracking points; plus, 60 million social media observations were obtained. Technology
scalability and performance were thus crucial for project success. Deploying IBM's scalable cloud
solution allowed the team to tackle this challenge.
Another challenge included the relatively small size of the CBS core team and the need for a bigger and
deeper bench to effectively manage the Roskilde project. IBM committed resources with data science
and technology knowledge to help the CBS researchers realize their project vision. Finally, the team
didn't have appropriate existing data management and analytics tools before partnering with IBM.

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Lessons Learned and Recommendations

"We believe that if we can create value for the guests, we can also create value for the festival," said
Jacobsen. The CBS team is now busy with plans for the 2016 Roskilde Festival. In looking back at
the 2015 experience, IDC identified the following lessons and recommendations for organizations
interested in launching their own new generation of data and analytics projects:

Expect the unexpected with any new data and analytics project

It is often difficult to project the amount of data to be collected for analysis when social media
and IoT/sensor data is involved. The technology platform must be able to scale and perform
to address the changing volume, variety, and velocity of data and to process both simple and
complex often unpredictable queries. Starting out with almost no technology resources,
CBS was able, with IBM's help and Cloud Data Services platform, to create a data collection
and analytics lab with massive scalability within hours.

Organizations looking to start new or augment existing data and analytics projects or programs
should consider cloud solutions as an integral part of their technology architecture. Based on
current business analytics solution demand and supply trends, IDC forecasts spending on
these cloud solutions to grow four to five times faster than spending on similar on-premises
solutions. The benefits of cloud solutions are not just in greater agility to respond to scalability
and performance requirement but also in the ability to more easily integrate external data, track
technology usage patterns, share data more efficiently within the organization and with external
parties, and benefit from the subscription-based pricing model.

A key aspect of interactions between humans and computers is the mental model, or what a
person thinks and believes about how a technology works. The mental model or mindset is
an important factor in the process of working with Big Data, according to Jacobsen, and it can
identify what actions and strategies are needed. But mental models are individually based.
At the festival, a key lesson learned was the need to "move your mindset," or to align mental
models among festival staff and volunteers to help them work better together a lesson with
importance for complex organizations from companies to cities.

System scalability and performance enable rapid experimentation, which can lead to innovation

The intuitive interface of IBM Watson Analytics, based on natural language processing and
visual discovery, got CBS students and researchers into analysis mode after just a short
training session. Watson Analytics, as well as SPSS Modeler, provided the team with the
flexibility to test a number of hypotheses and rapidly experiment with data. The cognitive
computing functionality of Watson Analytics supplemented the CBS team's own ideas about
analysis with recommendations for additional ideas. Jacobsen appreciated having the tool
propose new avenues to explore. Innovation is already flowing outward from the Roskilde
project. CBS students are using the festival data for 11 master theses on topics ranging from
crowd handling to social media analysis, as well as sustainable business models. And in May
2016, two of the three winners at an open innovation event in Denmark used Roskilde data.

Recognize the importance of building a diverse team

Many of the ideas and insights generated by CBS came as a result of the diverse team of
analysts, technologists, and project managers. The team members had backgrounds in
marketing, IT, data science, and social sciences and were augmented by IBM staff with data
science and data management expertise.

Organizations looking to derive the most value from their data and analytics projects
should ensure that project teams include a range of business analysts, data scientists,
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line-of-business subject matter experts, IT personnel and, when needed, external advisors or
consultants.

Focus on metrics and benefits that make a difference

Faced with a huge quantity of data to mine, Jacobsen and his team focused on analyzing
metrics key to customer experience. One example that we'll call "mud avoidance" analytics
shows attendees how to bypass muddy areas of festival grounds during a heavy rain.
Another example includes analysis of delivery of metrics that assessed food consumption
with the goal of encouraging more organic and local food purchases. Yet another analysis
focused on the behavior and movement of people showed that the behavior of most
attendees (who are in their twenties) is similar to their behavior in the digital world. Similar to
their constant switching among apps, these attendees started listening to one performer, then
moved to a different stage and a different performer, then back to the first one, and so on.
This erratic behavior presented certain challenges to service providers. The team is also
looking for methods to affect the preconference behavior of attendees by, for example, trying
to encourage ride sharing to the festival.

Organizations embarking on big data or analytics projects need to start by identifying core
business issues to be addressed and metrics or KPIs that have the potential to affect desired
outcomes. This should lead to assessment of current decision-making processes and the
data, technology, and people issues affecting these processes. Ultimately, results of any
analytics effort must yield actionable information. IDC research from 2015 shows that only
17% of organizations (in North America) completely agree that data is actionable. At the
music festival, the CBS team had some clear goals about sustainability and operational data
that it wanted to track and analyze. However, the breadth of data types and sources, as well
as the ability to collect and analyze them, rapidly led to some new and unexpected insights
and, most importantly, to new questions.

Allocate time and opportunity to experiment and collaborate to derive unexpected benefits

For the CBS team, the goal of the Roskilde experiment is to apply new data collection and
analysis methods and new insights for Smart Cities initiatives. For instance:

To understand waste collection better, the team will test sensors on garbage bins.
Jacobsen noted ongoing interest from commercial and municipal facilities
management companies in the lessons learned from the Roskilde project.

Crowd tracking with sensors will also be tested to help optimize security and services.
For local police, such data might lead to better security processes.

Regional and local governments in Denmark have expressed interest in the team's work.

Insights into food consumption linked to weather data can drive inventory,
logistical, and sales changes to reduce waste.

There has been high interest from the financial and retail sectors. Recently, some of the
lessons learned were used by the team to build a better net promoter score (NPS). The
project was tested on seven large retailers and found to have 96% alignment with
traditional methods for NPS (the models were built using social media data including
580,000 social media posts). The project is now expanding to 20+ additional retailers.

Finally, the lessons learned from the Roskilde project are being used for teaching at
CBS.

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Methodology
The project and company information contained in this document was obtained from multiple sources,
including information supplied by IBM and questions posed by IDC directly to Copenhagen Business
School employees.

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2016 IDC