Collaborate & Communicate 2017: UEFA Q&A

Daniel Marion is Chief of ICT at UEFA. He'll be speaking at Collaborate & Communicate 2017 about how communication tech helps underpin a collaborative culture at UEFA.

How would you define collaboration in one sentence?

To enable teams to interact in an easy and natural manner.

How important is effective communication to modern business success?

It is one of the key elements for success, especially in a world where everybody is mobile.

What are the key benefits of having the right collaboration and communication strategy in place and acting upon it?

Minimise overheads for people sharing information and people consuming it.

Conversely, what are the downsides of not getting this right?

Creating uncertainty and overheads.

What are companies currently doing well when it comes to collaboration and communication? How is your company a good example here?

Several tools are available to support good collaboration and communication. We have implemented the Jive platform to support our collaboration with the different host cities of UEFA Euro 2020, for example.

Is there anything you would change about your collaboration strategy if you did it all again? What words of advice would you give to others embarking on their collaboration journey?

Making people change is never an easy process. Everybody has their own ways of communicating and sharing information. The goal is to make them understand the benefits of using what's been put in place by the organisation. This is not always easy, but [explaining] what is in it for them is a key parameter for the users to adapt.

Who in the organisation should be taking the lead when it comes to choosing the right tools and implementing them successfully?

It's a joint effort between business stakeholder and IT. Decisions are made by the CIO and other C-level executives.

Where do you see the market and adoption of communication and collaboration tools headed? What innovation do you think is on the horizon?

Today there are many platforms, there will be more consolidation and more standards for sure. I think that AI/machine learning could bring some fantastic opportunities to make the human-to-machine interaction more natural, using voice or bots or any other human way of doing things.

Why should people attend our collaboration event to hear you speak?

I'll be explaining our learnings in implementing a collaboration platform between UEFA and the 13 host cities of UEFA Euro 2020.

Picture courtesy of UEFA

Collaborate and Communicate - the MUST attend event for IT professionals and business leaders. Come and hear from UEFA, GoCompare, Interoute, RingCentral, and Cisco.

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