CIO exit interview: Michael Ciavarella, swimming against the tide

There aren’t many technology leaders who can say they helped their country chalk up their most successful Olympic Games performances to date. But that’s what former Swimming Australia general manager technology, Michael Ciavarella, and his team managed to do in the two years preceding the delayed Tokyo Olympics held in 2021.

Ciavarella, who reached No.8 in the 2021 CIO50, had what many would consider the unenviable task of bringing a federated, not-for-profit organisation—founded in 1909—into the digital age, through a mindset shift and a scalable architecture, including the deployment and use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that enshrined data as king.

Ciavarella says that one of the main reasons the projects were so successful is that the end users—ranging from coaches, parents, volunteers, athletes and support staff—were deeply involved in the design and running of the systems; a move that was thoroughly vindicated by Australia’s swim team winning 21 medals including nine gold, making it their most successful Olympics for the swimming team to date.

The experience fully galvanised Ciavarella’s belief in ‘human centred design’ and that technology is nothing without the right people to guide its deployment and development. That, and the fact that AI projects don’t always need massive budgets to be successful, given he and his team at Swimming Australia were far from flush with funds.

“I actually prefer working with small budgets” Ciavarella tells CIO Australia.

It wasn’t too long after Tokyo before he was headhunted and in April 2022, Ciavarella became chief technology officer at Melbourne-based online fashion house A&S Labels, which sells Tiger Mist and I AM GIA labels internationally.

IT Leadership