Gary Brantley literally wrote the book on organizational transformation, and anyone who cracked its spine will understand why he joined the NFL as its new CIO last year and did nothing.
Rather than detail an immediate list of objectives, he embarked on a listening tour. Brantley met with every department of the league’s sprawling operations, spending enough time with each to understand the nuances of their roles. He spoke to the technology leaders at the NFL’s 32 franchises to learn their local issues and considerations.
NFL CIO Gary Brantley took an unusual approach in his first year on the job, mainly listening and learning.courtesy of nfl
Now, 12 months after taking the job, Brantley’s early initiatives are taking shape. Chief among them is the creation of an NFL Innovation Hub that seeks “to create a culture of innovation, cross-functionally and across the league, that allows us to operationalize ideas fast,” he said.
Guided by what he spent the past year hearing, Brantley has also played a role in streamlining efficiency, hiring three new roles in his department, creating a council to study artificial intelligence, helping the implementation of an updated credentialing system that uses facial recognition and introducing a concept that’s been called “Football as a Service.”
In his 2019 book — “The Art of Organizational Transformation: 7 Steps to Impact & Influence” — he wonders aloud why leaders are in such a rush to make changes “without being a part of the entity long enough to understand the true internal needs.”
“The first thing I’m trying to do is really understand how the organization operates,” Brantley said in a series of conversations with Sports Business Journal. “I don’t want to hear anything about tech — I’ll get to that at some particular point — but, how do you operate as an organization? What do you care about the most? What makes you go? How do you create revenue? All those types of things are interesting to me. And then I try to surround tech around it to be a support function for what the organization is trying to accomplish.”
Over the past quarter-century, Brantley has worked for big tech companies such as IBM and MCI WorldCom, founded his own faith-based media site, led technology at multiple levels of government — the state of Ohio, the city of Atlanta and the school system of Georgia’s DeKalb County — and then worked in the C-suite of a large home construction company.
Raised in Youngstown, Ohio, the son of a 30-year AT&T veteran, Brantley hails from a high-achieving family: His three siblings include a doctor and two attorneys.
These experiences have shaped Brantley. He is the rare technologist well-versed in bureaucracy, an innovator committed to efficiency, the entrepreneur with a long tenure in the public sector and the business leader who can roll up his sleeves and code — not to mention an accomplished drummer with an enviable collection of Jordans and a sub-two-hour half-marathoner who commutes to league headquarters on an electric scooter.
His hiring in October 2022 came at the end of a lengthy search, following Michelle McKenna’s departure as NFL CIO in March that year, but Brantley’s fit for the post quickly became apparent once he applied.
“When I interviewed him, I was like, ‘He gets it,’” recalled NFL Chief Administrative Officer Dasha Smith, noting his “understanding that you have a lot of key stakeholders, and every single one of them is very important. It’s really about consensus building.
“I knew within 10 minutes that Gary, honestly, was the one — based on his experience, based on being a real technologist, his humility, which is something that is really unique for someone who’s as talented as he is, and then he’s a sports fan, so that was good.
“He really just checked every single box.”
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The IT department of some organizations is relegated to the same status as referees and umpires, in that they’re only noticed when there’s a problem. At the NFL, that expectation of smooth operation without drawing attention to itself is very much there — but that’s only one part of a broad remit that also includes everything from HR and payroll to player health and safety and the searchability of the NFL Media archives.
“We have no room for failure on the technology front,” Smith said. “A lot of people don’t see all the pipes behind the scenes that go into making sure that that you and I can watch the game, that the coaches can talk to the quarterbacks on the field, that their Microsoft Surfaces are all working correctly. We cannot have any points of failure, so first and foremost, making sure that the game could be played flawlessly. Every single game.”
But, she continued, technology is also a strategic priority with the NFL wanting to continue as a leader in the space. That’s what lured Brantley to the role; he describes himself as “a creator and more of a business entrepreneur than, I would say, a traditional tech guy. I see myself as a business guy who just understands tech really, really well.”
“Technology needed to be a core component of the organization that I was working for, not just a back office support organization, not just a cost center. I wanted an opportunity to really use technology to be able to affect positive outcomes,” Brantley said.
The NFL’s deputy CIO, Aaron Amendolia, is a long-tenured member of the department who admitted that “every time you have a new leader come in, you’re always holding your breath about what’s this is going to be like, and it’s been refreshing,” he said, noting “Gary’s focus as a leader is always on communication and transparency.”
Together, they’ve endeavored to reconsider the role of the department. Messaging is important. The final chapter of Brantley’s book, after all, is titled “Shaping and Controlling the Narrative.” Along with adding a vice president of IT business services and posting for a vice president of football technology, Brantley hired the department’s first communications professional, to help craft storytelling.
“When you’ve been here for a while just doing IT for operational sake, you just do the operations, and you’re more attached to the systems than the outcome of what the systems do,” Amendolia said. “We’re actually tying to [ourselves] some of these business objectives and goals. That’s what we think will really change the perspective of IT from being this cost center and as being an operational back-of-house type of service to a strategic partner with the league.”
The Innovation Hub is the most concrete example. It’s a common platform within Fortune 500 companies but new to sports. The Hub is a way to standardize the process of ideating, monitoring and measuring progress. Major partners, such as Amazon, Microsoft and Verizon, are invited to collaborate, but it also can be used for crowdsourcing solutions, much as the NFL has found success with the Big Data Bowl and its health and safety competitions.
Gary Brantley’s expertise is sought frequently on technology issues. He brings experience across a number of fields. getty images
The idea germinated last spring, recalled Jason Dvorkin, AWS principal industry specialist for media, entertainment and sports, after Brantley gave a presentation on innovation at the National Association of Broadcasters conference. Conversations grew from there about how to shape this idea what Dvorkin described as Football as a Service — to take media and data such as the NFL Next Gen Stats and “make that all available in a centralized way, so that whoever needs it at whatever point in time in the process has a way to access it,” Dvorkin said. N-Ovate Solutions is spearheading implementation of the Hub.
Brantley then went out to build support, counting 39 meetings over six months. This is where politics, salesmanship and charisma become important.
“You can build and spend all types of money on technology, and no one really adopts the change. And that’s what you don’t want. And so everything about aspects of innovation, change, the ability to move the needle — it’s all people-focused,” he said, adding, “If you can go and you can approach it in a way that they don’t feel like it’s being forced on them, but they also feel like they had a piece and a part in it, it really helps us to speed things up.”
The conceit is to flip around the old truism that one has to hurry up and wait for other necessary pieces to fall into place for a project to move forward. Instead, it’s about waiting for the right idea and then hurrying up its completion.
“His vision is around trying to find the technology of the future and not make a snap decision. He’s looking five years out, 10 years out,” Dvorkin said.
“And he’s using us and our experience to help shape that operation. I mean, you look at what’s been done in player health and safety right now, using computer vision to create that Digital Athlete. He’s realizing that there’s more to that than just injury prevention. It’s: How do we start to coach the game of football better? How does that provide insights into the lower levels of the game to help cultivate and foster that next fan, to actually become passionate and deeply invested in the league?”
But innovation isn’t strictly relegated to the transformational ideas, either. Amendolia emphasized the importance of back-end efficiency to free up resources and time.
Brantley noted that it’s common for large organizations to be unaware of their redundancies or the full capabilities of their tools. He undertook a process called application rationalization, a mechanism of modern IT management to assess their software portfolio. He said they’ve identified 419 applications across the league, of which 40% show some redundancy. Different departments, for example, might use Microsoft Teams or Slack or Zoom for communications.
Aligning the league on shared platforms can be a major boon, though he acknowledged the importance of a multicloud environment and noted that compartmentalization is good — a point driven home during his time in Atlanta.
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When Brantley arrived in Atlanta, the city was in turmoil. In March 2018, the capital of Georgia was stricken by a brazen ransomware attack, and it was still reeling from the consequences of that when Brantley took over as CIO in October of that year.
He discovered that the city had only one firewall in place, which thankfully protected the world’s busiest airport, Atlanta’s Hartfield-Jackson, but most of the city’s other services were shut down. That included four or five systems each for email, customer relationship management and permits. By the time he was done, many of the solutions were consolidated, and he bequeathed the city 37 firewalls to contain any future network breaches.
“The goal was to make lasting change and to create an environment that will protect the city for years to come,” Brantley said. “There was going to be no innovating here. I had to rebuild an entire city infrastructure that was depleted. I didn’t have time for a three-year technology plan. There was a 12-month road map that was tied to making sure my team got back to general basics and general hygiene of how you operate a successful environment.
“They all knew things needed to be improved. So I knew I would get the resources and the funding that I needed to turn this around — for a short period of time. And then it would go back to what government is.”
By contrast, Brantley said, the NFL is “more nimble and flexible,” owing largely to the team owners, who have a more business and revenue-generating mindset than, say, a community-focused city council. The missions are very different, but his fundamental approach to enacting change within organizations is similar. What he said about rebuilding Atlanta’s technological infrastructure seems applicable to how he began his tenure at the NFL.
“I saw the end,” he said, “so I knew where to start.”
