IT Life: English Football’s ‘Other’ Manager

Rob Ray is the chief technology officer of the Football Association (FA), the third most written-about organisation in the country. He and his team help govern the sport in England, providing websites, administration tools and technical infrastructure for county associations across the country, at Wembley Stadium and the brand new £110 million National Football Centre at St George’s Park.

He has been in the role for the last three years, but hasn’t always worked in sport, having had a career spanning more than a quarter of a century. His favourite technology is search, he wanted to be a pilot when he was younger and predicts that the technology we will be using in ten years will be made by a company that doesn’t even exist yet.

What is your company, how long have you been in IT and what are your areas of expertise?
I work for the Football Association and I have been in IT for more than 25 years. I specialise in digital product development.

What’s your favourite project that you’ve ever worked on?
There are too many, but some of the top ones include St George’s Park and The Whole Game System (an online administration system for county associations) at the FA.

What technologies were you involved with ten years ago?
Ten years ago, I was in the middle of a significant transformation programme deploying many aspects of SAP – finance, supply chain and project planning – for Universal Pictures. This Renaissance project was deployed to 56 countries.

What do you expect to be using in ten years’ time?
I expect to be using a version of Google Glass made by a company that doesn’t currently exist.

What’s your budget outlook going forward?
I’m always trying to liberate money from ‘lights on costs’ to invest in future value projects.

What do you think is the greatest challenge for an IT company or department?
Getting everyone to agree that the customer is the one who is paying and that everyone else is a colleague. This creates a more effective working environment and a better end product.

To cloud or nor to cloud?
Yes, but where it is appropriate for commodity services. Cloud is not yet elastic, Amazon Web Services is the exception, so at present most services still appear to be managed hosting.

Who is your tech hero and who is your tech villain?
There are no individuals, but I don’t like companies that mess with the terms and conditions, in particular with how they manage private information [Erm, Google perhaps? Ed.].

What’s your favourite technology ever made and what do you use the most?
BlackBerry probably made the most impactful business technology, but its smartphones now seem past their sell by date. So it has to be Google, which is brilliant and scary. Search has changed the world.

Apart from your own, which company do you admire the most and why?
Ideo (an international design firm and innovation consultancy) – I love creative solutions to everyday problems.

What did you want to be when you were a child?
I wanted to be a pilot as my father was a helicopter pilot in the RAF.

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