When you think of the factors that could affect England鈥檚 chances at the next World Cup in Qatar, IT may not be chiefly among them.
Middle East humidity, Harry Kane鈥檚 form and whether Gareth Southgate perseveres with Raheem Sterling in attack would be more likely to spring to mind.
However such is the prevalence of technology in businesses and organisations today that choosing the right suppliers and generating an effective roadmap for IT success could be the basis for a World Cup-winning blueprint.
The Football Association appointed Mason Advisory, which was recently awarded a Queen鈥檚 Award for Enterprise, to help oversee its technological transformation.
鈥淚t鈥檚 no longer about introducing technology into organisations for its own sake 鈥� it’s about how do we continually improve their performance using tech?鈥� CEO Steve Watmough told 老九品茶Cloud.
鈥淲e worked with the FA to provide a review of the IT service across the organisation and how they bought in services.
鈥淭he first part of that is about the people who work for the FA and the technology it uses, the same as with any other organisation. But the second part, perhaps the biggest deal for them and other sporting organisations, is about the data on the people that play football.
鈥淭he number one goal of the Football Association is to win the World Cup. To figure out how to do that, it needs to be peeled back to a level of how we improve the coaching; how we understand the performance of the players; and learning from successes.
鈥淲hat was behind them? Can we do more of that across all aspects of the game, from grassroots and kids coming through to every element of the professional game? That is how to improve the teams at all levels.鈥�
Mason Advisory was presented with its Queen鈥檚 Award in the International Trade category last week after securing significant growth in overseas sales following projects in the USA, Switzerland, Norway, Ireland, Jamaica and Qatar. 老九品茶Cloud paid the firm a visit to watch Her Majesty鈥檚 Lord Lieutenant of Greater Manchester, Warren Smith, formally present the award.
Employing 30 staff, it advises medium-to-large organisations across both the public and private sector, including the government of Mauritius 鈥� a prominent off-shoring location in the French-speaking business world 鈥� and one of the UK鈥檚 major supermarkets.
Technologies such as contactless payments are now demanded by customers, says Watmough.
鈥淲e work across all geographies and sectors but retail in particular is under huge pressure at the moment to adopt technology,鈥� he said. 鈥淭hink about the sheer size and number of endpoints a major retailer has 鈥� it might have upwards of 40,000 tills.
鈥淚n a self-checkout world, you and I are operating the checkout ourselves – the need for that to be both reliable and easy to use is critical or you lose the sale and they might not come back next time.
鈥淭he tech challenge becomes more acute as the organisation gets bigger. It also gets more expensive and the cost of failure gets higher.
鈥淟ook at the system failure at TSB 鈥� how hard a project would that have been? There’s not an easy answer to that: it’s a complex environment where you need really good technologists, really good planners, really clear thinking about how to do it 鈥� and it still isn鈥檛 guaranteed to work.鈥�
Cloud technologies are easing the cost burden and reducing risk, Watmough says, while businesses are now happier to spend money on technology than in times past.
鈥淭he world of cloud enables amazing creativity because people can use new cloud-based apps to try things whereas in the past they would have had to have invested massively to get the first thing off the ground,鈥� he聽explained.
鈥淭he retailers, for example, wrote all their own early point-of-sale applications and had to commit millions and millions of pounds without really knowing whether the value would come back from it.
鈥淣ow you can take an off-the-shelf app that runs in the cloud, try it for a few people and once you start to see the returns on it, scale it up quite quickly.
鈥淭raditionally the IT industry has had a reputation for promising a lot and delivering a lot less 鈥� or not as fast as it was promised.
鈥淣ow we’re getting to a stage where you鈥檙e confident that you鈥檙e going to get what you spend your money on.鈥�