32 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • MAY/JUNE 2024 Lottery Data Cloud (LDC). LDC is IGT’s internal, cloud-based, advanced analytics platform that brings together cross-jurisdictional, cross-functional data sources to help IGT analysts find correlations and insights to drive enhancements and efficiencies, both for IGT and its customer lotteries. “A driving goal of LDC was to bring together seemingly disparate sets of data, combined with machine-learning technologies, to discover insights and derive business value from them,” says Ira Lough, IGT Senior Director Research Science and Data Strategy, who directed the development team. “Within this platform, we're building applications and toolsets that help automate analytic tasks. They provide IGT analysts with a powerful, governed, data platform that will allow them and the lotteries they serve to make quicker, more informed business decisions — and further enable IGT to continuously improve the products and services we provide.” Applied to self-service optimization, for instance, the LDC brings more dimension to the data and allows analysts to interrogate it readily in various ways. Craig Hall, IGT Senior Manager Software Engineering and Data Strategy, who was instrumental in developing the platform, provides some examples: “Once we identify all the locations that might be candidates for an LVM, we can assess the various attributes of these locations, such as trade style, urbanicity, sales volume, and more. We can then run these attributes against the 150,000+ existing locations for which we obtain data through RMI, and identify a prioritized list of locations that would benefit most from the placement of an incremental vending machine. “Several lotteries are doing a similar analysis on their own, but one of the advantages we can provide is a much larger sample size to find commonalities,” he adds. “And, because the retail chains cross jurisdictions, we are able to leverage cross-jurisdictional RMI data to provide a more holistic assessment of a chain’s performance. This in turn increases a lottery’s confidence about what they’re seeing or plan to do in their own state.” The analysis derived from RMI and IGT’s LDC platform also enables national retailers to have more meaningful conversations with their partner lotteries, armed with the tools, data, and logic to support specific recommendations. “Due to the enormous amount of vending machine data, it’s typically laborious to do LVM analysis with traditional technologies,” notes Lough. “With this scalable, cloudbased platform, it becomes a lot easier. IGT analysts are now able to process these data sets more efficiently.” “What we try to do is bring information to light for lotteries to act on,” says Desautels. “We can query the data and refine recommendations using the factors that the LDC takes into account, helping lotteries focus on the best opportunities. If a retailer is willing to have the conversation with their lottery jurisdictions, and a lottery is open to adding LVMs or has inventory available, we can support them in selecting the stores and surveying the locations to make sure they’re a good fit for that store’s layout and for the store manager — all the way through to in-store placement and post-execution measuring and monitoring.” IGT’s specialized teams support lotteries with all key drivers of optimization, including minimizing out of stocks and space to sales analysis. Gina Easley, IGT Senior Manager National Retail Accounts, notes, “It’s important not only to connect with our customers where they are, but also to connect with lottery retailers by offering multiple support A sample dashboard illustrates one type of analysis that IGT’s Lottery Data Cloud can produce, enabling IGT analysts to readily find commonalities or differences in LVM performance and assess how various factors impact expected sales growth.
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