The McCue Interview: PGA European Tour CIO Mark Lichtenhein

Standing in for Andy McCue this month, silicon.com's Tony Hallett catches up with a polyglot IT boss whose work keeping the professional golf tour running in Europe comes to a head at the British Open championship in a few days.

As we sweep down the side of the fairway of the first hole at the Wales Open golf tournament in a very official-looking - and dare I say pretty old-fashioned - open-topped golf buggy, I reckon I'm in the company of a CIO with one of the most interesting positions in Europe today.

For one thing, Mark Lichtenhein's job sounds glamorous. His official moniker is Director of IT and New Media for the PGA European Tour. If you hate golf or sport in general, at this stage I recognise you might be feeling slightly nonplussed - but stick with me here. If you're a fan, you'll probably guess Lichtenhein is one of sport's top CIOs.

But Lichtenhein describes his job in straightforward terms. "It's simply about moving information as quickly as possible," he tells me later on, sitting in the event's media centre, surrounded by golf hacks.

It's a challenge shared by many a silicon.com reader. But I doubt many have had Lichtenhein's unique career path or current challenges.

Lichtenhein is British but his name points to German roots - a great-grandfather - and it was from Keele University that he graduated with a degree in computer science and German. That led him to work for Siemens for five years first in Germany - "I certainly felt like an honorary German - people could actually say and spell my name!" - and then to Paris, where he came to specialise in collaborative research and product development.

This tour of mainland Europe next took him to Bilbao, where he was part of the initial management team behind the European Software Institute. The aim was again pan-European applied research, evaluating new tools and methods, supported by the EU and major software vendors.

At an early stage of his career, Lichtenhein found himself well-versed in the research and supply sides of IT but in need of something different. His next step wasn't to the European Tour, though that would later prove a perfect move.

"I was one of the founding team of Golfweb, along with a bunch of ex-Sun employees from California. It was the first golf channel on the web," he says.

It was during the mid-1990s, when the world was waking up to the world wide web, and by all accounts a mad time for all involved. The Golfweb team were obsessive about data. With tournament golf, unlike most stadium or arena sports, no one can watch all the action. Stats and broken-down scoring have always been integral. Golfweb saw an opportunity and rode it to its logical conclusion.

The company initially hosted the Europeantour.com website - now a key part of Lichtenhein's remit here - before it sold out to Sportsline USA in 1998. Lichtenhein isn't saying how well he did out of the deal.

But the experience carried many lessons. First, technology is golf's future - and by that I mean information technology, not just over-sized club-heads. Second, Lichtenhein knew how to work with IT vendors ("I'm not about to get duped"), how to develop software, how to collaborate - by this stage in five different languages.

And perhaps most importantly, Lichtenhein had more than an inkling he'd make a great IT director.

So when he got the call from the European Tour, the decision wasn't hard. Time in the industry and at Golfweb had taught Lichtenhein the technology side. His days in France (where, yes, there really are near-empty courses) had taught him the game. (And if you need to know, his handicap is 9 - "respectable for an IT director", he insists.)

Now he reports to George O'Grady, the Tour's executive director-designate, and probably works most closely with the organisation's marketing director. He's a respected team member.

The money coming in to golf is huge and while Lichtenhein's team isn't big, its output is critical to millions of viewers around Europe and farther away, such is the reach of the 'European' tour these days.