London Business School MBA holder heads UEFA ICT department

PRLog (Press Release) - Aug. 3, 2012 - The Union of European Football Association (UEFA) is the governing body that oversees professional footballing events across Europe. The professional body is complete with top figures in sports and business, including London Business School’s MBA and engineering degree holder Daniel Marion.

Marion  who has been with UEFA for over a decade, holding various positions in digital media and IT now heads the UEFA ICT team of over 90 individuals, with full ability to provide authoritative information on how UEFA business operations sets them aside from other businesses.

Marion who has received leadership training executive education, spoke to ‘Computing’, “We are set up very differently [to other organisations], we don't do anything in-house in terms of operations; we outsource all of the development and all of the hosting”

He continues by saying, “ICT in UEFA is not really a development house or an infrastructure house – but we do have some technical experts for things like the Euro 2012 championships. We have a service desk and system engineers to do maintenance on our servers which is actually outsourced to Interoute,”

With leadership training education in the bag, Marion’s responsibility as the head of UEFA ICT department includes the management of the organisation’s back-end technology for events such as that of the recent European Championship games. The team adopts a flexible approach so that it can adjust to events regardless of the magnitude of work which is entailed, such as was displayed in EURO 2012, where an extended team of 1,500 individuals (over 10 times the original size) managed the ICT operations and telecommunications.

According to Marion, the UEFA works with a number of Projects managers and business specialists who work with the ICT team in ensuring that areas of technology in the business are fully functional. He says, “They pilot and coordinate and educate all of the partners UEFA uses to make sure they deliver the software and infrastructure quality we want, and the operations that we need."

As well as the internal team and partners working with UEFA ICT function, the team maintains relationships with a number of external agents, such as Interoute, who by contract must adhere to regulations and constraints imposed by UEFA.

"Suppliers have to realise that they have to change the way they operate to comply with our demands. This has been easy with Interoute but was more complicated with Orange and Ukraine Telecom because they are far bigger organisations," Marion says.

Looking into the future of UEFA’s ICT department, it is his believe that the business would extend its communication’s strategy to include handheld devices for operations for football matches following trends from staffs using personal devices for work purposes.

For more information on leadership training or executive education at London Business School, visit http://www.london.edu/programmes/executiveeducation/eol.html