Case Study · Wisconsin Lottery
When the lottery's technology stops, ticket sales stop across the entire state of Wisconsin — and state revenue and public trust stop with them. For a decade, Victor Long was the general manager accountable for making sure that never happened.
The Engagement
IGT held the contract for the Wisconsin Lottery's end-to-end technology: the data center, point-of-sale terminals at retailers statewide, the network connecting them, back-office sales and administration tools, an outbound call center selling instant tickets to retailers, marketing support, and warehouse and distribution.
Victor took over as General Manager and ran the operation for ten years.
The Starting Point
A business intelligence system the customer couldn't use. The reporting solution had never been customized to the lottery's requirements — data objects were unintelligible, there was no data dictionary, and queries could run for hours and return nothing.
On the lottery's annual evaluation, the BI solution earned a D.
The Turnaround
He treated it as a business problem, not a software problem. Working with technical staff, he customized the system to the lottery's actual requirements, built a data dictionary so users knew what they were looking at, and wrote a query guide that stopped conflicting queries before they ran.
The lottery's grade for the BI solution went from a D to a B.
The Work
A customer scorecard tracking every contractual service level — network and system availability, software defect rates, call center speed to answer, field-service response times — used to drive decisions and improvement initiatives. Performance stopped being a matter of opinion.
CRM tools that predicted which instant tickets each retailer should order to lift sales and prevent stockouts. Call center reps used the predictions on every outbound call. Instant ticket sales grew more than 10% year over year.
A linear programming model optimized the mix of instant-ticket price points at retail and guided the lottery's launch schedule — improving the lottery's satisfaction with marketing support.
An extensive set of pivot-table crosstabulations gave the lottery ongoing visibility into instant ticket sales.
The Results
The lottery graded the contract every year, across every category of service.
The lottery's grade for the business intelligence solution, after it was rebuilt around their actual requirements.
Year-over-year growth in instant ticket sales, driven by predictive ordering tools for retailers.
Over Victor's decade running Wisconsin, his team earned mostly 5-out-of-5 scores on customer satisfaction surveys — measured every year, across every category, on a statewide operation where a single failure could have stopped lottery sales across Wisconsin.
The Method
Your stakes may not be statewide, but the method is the same: learn how the business actually runs, fix the data so people can use them, measure what matters, and let the numbers drive the decisions.
This case study describes Victor Long's work as General Manager of IGT's Wisconsin Lottery contract. Results are drawn from the lottery's annual performance evaluations and internal sales reporting. Written by Victor Long, Long Business Intelligence Solutions.
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