At a time when football news is in full swing, Armelle Kus Saint Supéry, newly appointed CIO at the Fédération Française de Football, is helping to transform the institution. Her ambition: "to promote digital transformation in the service of innovation".
When we met Armelle Kus Saint-Supéry, the FFF's new IT Director, in the middle of Euro2016, she was extremely enthusiastic about her mission and the many projects she is working on to "make the IT system a high-performance tool at the service of all those involved in French football". The FFF is in fact the largest sporting federation, with 2,200,000 members spread across 17,000 clubs and kicking a ball around 28,000 stadiums. Added to this are the 1 million matches organised every year by 350,000 volunteers.
These are staggering figures, especially as until now much of the administrative work (licences, competitions, pitches, committees, etc.) has been done by hand before being entered into the historic Foot2000 system. "One of our first key projects was the roll-out of the computerised match sheet, which uses a dedicated mobile application to prepare the match and send back the results, validated by the electronic signature of both teams. This will be followed shortly by the electronic licence and many other mobile services," explains Armelle Kus Saint-Supéry.
By dematerialising part of its work, in addition to saving time, the FFF recovers and consolidates valuable data that it can use on several levels: from setting up a decision-making information system to steer its activities, to creating a personalised, multi-channel digital experience for each player in the game - such as players, who will be able to simply view their results, match histories, progress, etc. - "a first step before developing tools to help sports performance via connected objects and Big Data", anticipates the IT Director, who adds that "our mission at the FFF is also to train and detect potential".
Managing the legacy and integrating new skills
To bring her various projects to a successful conclusion, Armelle Kus Saint-Supéry has changed the way things work internally, introducing agile development cycles based on an on-site service centre, a dedicated IT department contact for each business department, and the integration of new skills such as an art director and an HTML integrator: "This type of skill brings real added value to project design, and makes a real difference to the final product. When users see the mock-ups, there's a real wow effect", enthuses the IT Department, which was able to convince the existing protagonists to change the organisation and also explain to them that "the IT Department is there to put in place a digital foundation with reusable building blocks". As a result, a new way of working has gradually been put in place with marketing and all the business departments.
Urbanising the IS to develop new services
After a first stage of securing the information system, the IT Department does not intend to stop there and has defined a 4-year strategic plan, the main drivers of which are: the cloud, mobility and access to data: "the flagship project of this plan is the urbanisation of the information system around the renovation of the ageing core business. I also want to secure all our operating and maintenance processes as quickly as possible, so that we can devote as much energy as possible to developing new services", concludes Armelle Kus Saint Supéry, who points out that she does not intend to develop everything in-house and is looking to create partnerships with start-ups around sports projects. In short, a number of goals for a field-based IT company.
The FFF's digital projects
- Pursue the dematerialisation of our administrative processes: licence management, club affiliation, etc.
- Support the fields of sports excellence by providing tools that make it easy to access relevant data, capitalise on it and make the right choices: monitoring detections, managing national selections, appointing officials, etc.
- Facilitate club management by developing new services: organisation of training sessions, player invitations, etc.
- Develop a fluid, personalised, multi-channel digital experience for all those involved in football (fans, players, managers, etc.): targeted content that adapts to their profile and makes them want to interact with the FFF.
An IT Department and its transformation paths
My aim is to raise the IT Department's level of maturity in two stages, so as to make IT a real strategic lever for the FFF: firstly, to secure and deliver business value; secondly, to rationalise and innovate. The challenges are as follows:
- Guarantee that the quality of services delivered by the IT Department matches the level of service expected by the business lines
- Develop close links between IT and business lines and provide them with know-how
- Ensuring the IT Department's operational performance
- Providing a vision for the development of our IT and for innovation
Numerous projects are contributing to this: sourcing strategy, professionalisation of our internal operating methods, capitalisation, change management with employees, etc.