Little is known, but it is traditional for the organizing committees of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (JOP) to call on a large consulting firm to support them on a number of issues. For Paris 2024, PwC was chosen – or more precisely its entity in France, which brings together some 7,000 employees. PwC is therefore an official partner of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, after the contract was ratified on July 6, 2021, almost three years ago.
“In all, some 500 consultants contributed to more than 450 projects,” underlines Éric Dumont, Sport and Mega Events partner at PwC France and Maghreb, “knowing that the spectrum of our interventions on the Games is particularly broad, between relationships with suppliers and dialogue, supported by regular interactions, with key stakeholders in the delivery of the Games: IOC, main service providers, representatives of the State and communities, organizers in charge of the sites (…). »
In short, these are almost all aspects of the JOP, which require expertise in a series of areas where the consulting firm has solid added value: management, strategy, risks, technologies, legal and tax… Remember that the Games are a global organization, with the need to match very strong operational expectations with a particularly complex framework.
Particularly thought-provoking examples of PwC’s input include “who does what at what time.” The firm worked on a tool capable, on the big day of an event, of listing all the people present on the site (personnel responsible for security, health issues, volunteers, etc.) and regulating their aisles as best as possible -and-comings.
Another equally dynamic example: applications. The firm supported the development of technology norms and standards for nearly 200 apps, which again cover a very wide range, commensurate with the diversity of needs.
For example, how to properly automate application deployments in order to optimize intervention and update times in the event of an incident (DevSecOps standards); how to properly measure cloud cost consumption and thus optimize them (FinOps/GreenOps); or what are the standard software architectures for the Games’ mobile applications in order to ensure that they are built in a homogeneous manner and lend themselves easily to maintenance operations.
In a not-so-distant field, the firm worked on the selection of said volunteers. “The Cojo (Paris 2024 Organizing Committee, Editor’s note) received around 350,000 applications with the idea of retaining 45,000,” recalls Éric Dumont. A marshalling yard was needed capable of discerning potentially malicious profiles. We played this role. »
Concretely, as part of this identification of fraudulent volunteer profiles, PwC France’s data scientists carried out targeted analyzes of the application database.
Generally speaking, since 2021, PwC has relayed the rise of Cojo, with the aim of ensuring that activities are as little siled as possible. Gradually, we saw the emergence of some particularly sensitive issues, such as data storage, where the imperatives of national sovereignty had to be taken into account.
PwC’s mission alongside Cojo does not end next September, immediately after the end of the Paralympic Games. It could run even until summer 2025.
The legacy of Paris 2024 is a subject in itself, without taking into account the disputes that may possibly arise after the event. Suffice it to say that the firm’s expertise must once again be applied in numerous registers.
Generally speaking, PwC is not finished with the Olympic adventure. The competitions for the 2024 Games have not even started and its consultants already have the 2030 deadline in their sights.
2030 is the year when the Winter Games will take place in the French Alps, knowing that the French National Olympic and Sports Committee (CNOSF) is closely associated for the occasion with the two regions Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. A new challenge to which PwC has already contributed as part of the creation of the application file for the South Region.