London Olympics gets IT chief
Co-op man breaks tape
Posted in Management, 16th September 2008 12:02 GMT
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The organisers of the 2012 Olympics in London have finally named the man who'll be in charge of overspending on implementing its IT strategy.
Gerry Pennell will leave his current job as "executive director of business transformation and shared services" [nope, dunno either] at Co-op Financial Services to take charge of IT at London 2012 from early October.
Marshalling contractors BT, Atos Origin, IBM, Accenture and others, he'll have overall responsibility for the games' telecoms, media tech and venue IT. He took a similar role at the Manchester Commonwealth Games in 2002.
Pennell said: "I'm joining LOCOG at an exciting time, as London officially becomes the next Summer Host City, and I'm looking forward to leading a strong team and delivering a technology solution which underpins a truly memorable Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012." ®
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COMMENTS
Past Experience
A quick reminder - Did he (Gerry as CIO of that event) and the rest of the country, really do that bad a job of the Commonwealth Games event? At the time it was credited as a huge success.
Maybe this was because it was held in the Northern half of the country? The wembley cash-cow fiasco doesn't particularly inspire any of us Northerners with confidence.
Just a thought - instead of out-sourcing abroad why not re-locate the event up North where they are probably a bit more hard working? It is also the home of the British Cycling team who enjoyed great success this year, the richest football club in the world and the most succesful football teams...
hmmm - outsourcing
Given his past track record, are we now expecting the "Delhi 2012" Olympic games?
An accident waiting to happen
He's been in his job for 24 hours or so, and he is British (Mis)management, so has he managed to break it yet?
that long and strange job title
"executive director of business transformation and shared services" - I think I can shed some light on the meaning, as in my current work I heard those words almost twice a day.
"executive director" - The one IT responsible that gets a pay most closer to the rest of the company execs.
"business transformation" - To save money you sacked a lot of IT staff. To compensate for that you outsourced a lot of IT work to big outsourcing companies that neither know about your business nor about any technology developed after 2002 (this is the year that the big consulting company outsourced its technological knowledge to a mix of Bangalore, Singapur and Manila fresh graduates) Of course, a multi million multi year contract to deploy SAP was signed as part of the deal. The consultants always recommend that your business is changed to fit the way SAP works, as they could not do anything with it even if their lives and the ones of their relatives depended on knowing how actually SAP works. Hence the "business transformation"
outsourced services" - The finance gut, not to be outdone by the IT guy, set up a big office full of young and unexperienced bean counters in some part of western Europe or Asia. The idea was to save a lot of labour cost by using cheap labor that, in spite of the low price, is extremely well educated. Well, really what most of them excel at is at speaking english, as they don't know a bit about the business, and their only interest is to endure a couple of years in the role. After that they will move to a management position in a local company that is delighted to have such a load of experience with them. This is the "outsourced services" part.
In short, IT in the Olympics is doomed. Better to outsource the event, as some previous comments have suggested.
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