Dream Job

When Michelle McKenna-Doyle worked in the finance department at Walt Disney World, she grew tired of entering numbers on spreadsheets. She just couldn't understand why Disney was paying for lists of information about its customers when it had so much rich data at its fingertips. That's when she started asking questions.

McKenna-Doyle says curiosity about the way things worked is how she transitioned from finance and marketing to IT. She worked her way up to vice president of IT at Walt Disney Co. to CIO of Centix Destination Properties. She has also held that title at Universal Orland Resort and Constellation Energy.

It's also how she scored her dream job as chief information officer and a senior vice president of the National Football League, the professional football organization with around $10 billion in annual revenue. McKenna-Doyle leads nearly 400 employees, working on everything from NFL Network, to NFL films, to its digital app, NFL Now. She's also in charge of all game-related technology, including everything from coaches' headsets and digital playbooks to gathering player statistics.

McKenna-Doyle spoke with the Business Observer during a recent Tampa Bay Technology Forum women's luncheon in St. Petersburg. Here's an edited transcript of the interview:

How is the NFL different than other corporate posts you've had?
What is challenging for the NFL is that while we are the overall operating entity for the league, we have 32 clubs that all operate independently. We collaborate, but we also compete. The league position has to not only be technically competent, but also very good at relationship building and influence because you don't have direct control like I had direct control over thousands of employees when I worked at Constellation.

Speaking of challenges, what's your biggest challenge?
I'm the first CIO for the NFL, so I think my first challenge was to explain to people exactly why I was there. I wasn't there just to make sure the data center ran and all their laptops work. We need to connect all the dots so each individual business unit isn't chasing something down on its own. Just because I wanted to connect the dot, didn't mean I wanted to own the dot. The business units now have gotten used to that within the league. Now it's changed from me selling why they needed a CIO, to I don't have enough resources to cover the demands.

What are some of your current initiatives?
We were doing big data analytics before it was cool because everything that we do is based off statistics of the game and player statistics. We have so much information on our players and now our next generation of information is focused on our fans — to make sure we know who they are, what they want, and making sure we provide benefits for season ticket holders that are unique to them.
Getting our stadiums ready for that kind of fan interaction is a big focus. The at-home experience has gotten so good watching our games that we just have to make sure that the best place to watch an NFL game is still at an NFL stadium.

How do you improve the fan experience?
It starts foundationally with the connectivity. It's a challenge for any stadium. The two things that signals have difficulty traveling through are concrete and water. So take 70,000 people made primarily of water, surrounded by concrete, and just the engineering is challenging. So the first step is ensuring each stadium has enough connectivity, and we do that through investing in Wi-Fi, and making sure clubs and stadiums consider that as important as bathrooms.

Why is connectivity so important?
Foundationally people need to be able to connect to their social networks because what we find is people want to share the fact they're at an NFL game. I don't want to upload a picture when I get home, I want to upload it now.

Five years ago our networks were focused more on downloading content when they were in the stadium. It switched. Now people are doing more uploading. So making sure we have the right speeds for uploads and we prioritize traffic on downloads.

What's an example of a technology you're working on?
In this off season one of my new initiatives is working on a new instant replay system. For the first time ever, all instant challenge calls will be sent back to New York for consultation with the referee on the field. Before it was all made 100% on the field. Now for a quality control in making sure we make the right call all the time, we're adding that consult feature. This summer, we're having to wire every stadium to send all their video and replay information back to a central replay location in my office in New York.

How do you enforce your initiatives, with 32 different clubs?
The first pass is a recommendation. Our next phase was we did a whole engineering study and basically gave them minimum standards that they had to meet by a certain date. That got a lot of clubs saying, “Okay we'd love to get it going and we need to get investing.” It's difficult because in many cases the clubs don't own the stadium; they're a tenant. The city or the county or the visitor's bureau — there's all kinds of people they have to convince to invest.

The third and final, is if they don't come there, what's the penalty? We don't like to go there, but you can see in areas like game safety, we penalize games, coaches and clubs for not following the rules. Will we eventually get there on this stuff? I don't think so because the business case has been clearly made and fans speak. They speak with their wallets and we've done lots of research. Now it's just a matter of time and getting it done. Most stadiums we anticipate it to have the full level of connectivity by the 2015 season.

How many do you think will be ready by 2015?
I'd say 30 of the 32. We have a couple on the West Coast that are in some pretty old stadiums and it depends on how their lease discussions go. I think this season we'll have 22. A lot of it is looking for sponsors and partners and how to engineer the funding of it.

What decision are you most proud of?
It was the decision years ago that before data mining and CRM was really CRM, I was at Disney, pushing for why we don't know more about our customers. Why were we buying lists about our customers when our own systems had all this valuable data, like we know what tickets they buy, we know where they eat, we know where they stay, we know how long they stay, and all this stuff. But it was all locked in a bunch of different systems. So you know I wasn't in IT at the time. I was in finance and marketing, and that turned in to a larger project that ultimately transformed the way that Disney talks to its customers. That's a good example that no matter what level or department you're in, if you have a good idea, find the right people that need to listen to it and don't give up.

Is there a decision on which you wish you could have a mulligan?
At Universal Studios we were moving really fast in our online presence and we had the Wizarding World of Harry Potter going on at the same time. We were trying to launch an online merchandising store, a whole new online presence. And I think I bit off the whole thing with the pressure from the top that it all had to be done. If I could go back, I probably would have chunked that into much smaller projects and made sure they were each delivered consistently.

What's your advice to other women executives?
The first thing you have to learn to let go of is guilt and the concern about what other people think about you. As women and as mothers, we carry around quite a bit of guilt if we have a very successful career, where the dad can travel and be away and no one judges that. I have been judged by my children's friends' moms about, “Oh, she's never there.” I don't do carpool pick-ups. It really bothered me. But what matters is what your kids think.

Advice for others?
When you're looking for a new job, don't be geographically constrained. You can always negotiate, if they really want you, to make sure you eventually get back to what you call home on a regular basis. But if you say I'm only going to work in Tampa, St. Pete or Orlando, your job pool just went like that. I love Florida, I miss Florida, one day Florida will be home again. Everyone teases me that the Bucs, the Dolphins and the Jaguars get more of my attention. That's not true, but I do love our home teams. I love all of our teams though — I love all 32.

Executive Summary
Company. NFL Industry. Technology Key. Creating an excellent experience is paramount to maintaining loyal customers.