London Olympics gets IT chief 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 …
...he wasn't responsible for the co-op bank's completely incompetent impementation of their business banking web interface.
Basically, the only reason I didn't go through the pain of moving the business bank account to another bank was because I could pay in cheques around the corner at the post office - and all the other banks websites were mostly as bad - i.e. IE only or wouldn't work on a secure browser.
The co-op bank completely under-resourced the web site and for two years you basically got Corba object errors. It's better now providing you avoid peak times.
On the plus side - their comsumer web site has always been pretty good - so maybe that was his area.
"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.
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...
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