MOT Class Hears from the Olympic Games Digital Manager
Students in the TLI classroom watch on Friday morning as John Tweardy of Deloitte talks about the digital architecture behind the Olympic games.
About halfway through his presentation to TLI's Digital Transformation class, John Tweardy, managing partner for Deloitte's Sports and Major Events Practice, had a pop quiz for the MOT students in attendance.
"How many volunteers applied to work at the 2024 Olympics?" he asked.
It's not an idle question for Tweardy and his team, who oversee the entire digital architecture for the global Olympic and Paralympic games. The games are massive global events, peaking for 12 days every two years.
The answer, by the way, is around 100,000 volunteer applications received and processed by the IOC.
Volunteer services is only a small piece of what Deloitte must do. The Olympics is a massive and fragmented enterprise, starting with the International Olympic Commission based in Switzerland, the Paralympic Commission based in Bonn, Germany, extending to 206 National Olympic Committees, and then the organizing committees for the host cities. The 2024 games in Paris offered 329 events in 35 different venues and coordinated 45,000 volunteers.
"An Olympic Games is like a company that begins life as a startup, grows to a fortune 100 company within a few years, then is gone within 180 days of the closing ceremonies," Tweardy said.
Providing the digital infrastructure for the unique and complex structure of the IOC and its global stakeholders makes it a particularly challenging environment for Deloitte to manage. In spite of its biennial rebirth, the IOC is still an entity that's existed for more than a century and it can be resistant to change.
"Companies often say they want transformative change, when what they really want is optimization," Tweardy said. "But what they really need is transformative change."
Part of that change was ending the IOC practice of requiring the digital architects to use whatever software products had been brought on as "official sponsors" of the Olympics. "We put our foot down early in the game and said, the only way we can feel comfortable with delivering excellence, building deep knowledge and optimization within our own talent models, is to have tools that we can own horizontally. "
Deloitte's efforts have been on streamlining processes, delivering data to stakeholders more quickly, and using innovative technology to automate. "Lots of automated stories, lots of automated code and automated alerts," Tweardy said. As an example, he cited AI tools that feed updated athlete performance stats to global stakeholders in real time.
Tweardy had already been scheduled to speak for the entire two-hour class, but gamely agreed to stay late to answer students' questions about particular tools and processes used, cloud-based architecture, geographic concerns, language barriers, integration testing, pen testing, and even why the summer games are more popular than the winter games.
"Relatively few people in the world play winter sports," was Tweardy's answer. "To run a footrace, don't need special equipment or ice time. All you need are a pair of sneakers. To play football, you just need a ball."
He paused. "I'm talking about football outside the U.S., of course," he said to laughter.