Olympic IT team hails smooth running of systems in Athens

The Athens Olympic Games were a record-breaking success for Team GB.

The event was also a big success for supplier Atos Origin's IT team.

'We actually didn't face any major problems and it went as planned,' says Patrick Adiba, vice president of major events for the company managing the Games' technology.

Athens concluded more than three years preparation for Atos Origin, during which more than 200,000 hours were dedicated to IT testing.

'It's been an interesting experience because you can simulate everything, but it's not until you're in the field that you really see the size of the operation,' says Adiba.

'But all the rehearsals and test events were really useful. Not only because we faced some of the situations we simulated, but also because it allowed the team to operate as a whole.'

Real-time

Atos Origin's team provided and distributed real-time results to more than 8,000 broadcasters, in under 0.3 seconds, for 18 sports.

They also supplied around 3,000,000Kb, in over 800,000 messages of direct data feeds, to the official Athens 2004 web site, six world news press agencies and 13 other data feed clients.

'The broadcasting of results was perfectly in synch with competition. We were serving about 21,500 journalists and if there had been problems, it would have become public knowledge very quickly,' says Adiba.

But, of course, running the world's largest sporting event was not all a walk in the Olympic park.

Adiba recognises that planning, and then running, the 2004 Games has thrown up a range of interesting challenges.

He's hopeful that Atos Origin will learn from the Athens experience, as it puts the technology infrastructure in place for the next winter and summer Olympics.

The supplier is providing and managing the technology for the Games as part of the world's largest sports-related IT contract.

The deal, awarded in 1999, covers last year's winter Games in Salt Lake City, Athens 2004, the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin and the Beijing Games in 2008. Each event has an IT budget of $300m - a combined spend of $1.2bn.

Security success

Containment was the key to Atos Origin's IT security systems in Athens - and the technology provider implemented an accreditation badge system to help ensure workers and visitors were kept to specific areas of the Olympics site.

In all, the IT provider delivered almost 200,000 badges.

Other high-tech systems, such as radio frequency identification (RFID) or biometrics, which offer more complex forms of security, were not included.

Adiba says the accreditation badge system worked effectively and there were 'no major problems in delivery or operation'.

But there's still room for change in policy.

Adiba says discussions have taken place around using RFID or contactless smartcards of the type regularly used in mass-transportation systems, at future events.

'For Torino it's too late, because we'll start the IT testing for that Games soon. But it could be an option for Beijing or beyond,' says Adiba.

Discussions on these technologies centre on costs and security.

'The price and quality equation is very complex and this type of technology is not proven right now,' says Adiba.

'For the time being though, there's no formal group evaluating the pros and cons of RFID - and certainly no decision.'

With costs tight, Adiba says Atos Origin concentrated on IT security in Athens.

The installed system relied on a combination of processes, accreditation systems and monitoring technologies.

The network was also segregated into different Olympic systems, such as broadcasting.

Through this type of segregation, Atos Origin was able to enforce control inside the network and restrict access at system boundaries to prevent people having contact with data in other parts of the Games' network.

Abnormal behaviour

While there were no proven attacks on the network during the Games, Atos Origin did observe some abnormal behaviour.

Some of the IT infrastructure is set in an open environment, and Adiba says: 'We believe some of the events we saw, such as people logging-in on the wrong computer at the wrong time, may have been related [to an attack].'

Adiba says Atos Origin couldn't relate these events to a person, only to a particular piece of hardware at a particular moment.

'So we knew which computer had behaviour that was not considered as normal, but we didn't know who was on the other side of the keyboard,' he says.

Analysing the results

Further evidence of the performance of Atos Origin's IT systems will become available later in the year.

'In parallel to the event, we ran a data and knowledge capturing process,' says Adiba.

'We captured information from all the various events during the Games.'

Most of the systems started running before the Games, on 17 July, and the IT team started to capture information then.

'We will use that data to build the lessons learned from the Games,' says Adiba.

During October and November, Atos Origin will begin analysing the results.

'It's a mixture of process and technology-oriented observations,' explains Adiba.

'We have to check that the various policies and procedures were useful and well designed. We also have to analyse how the technology performed.'

From this analysis, Adiba - and the rest of the Olympic IT team - hope to learn some valuable lessons for Turin and Beijing.

Adiba says it too early to be specific, but he's already formulating some ideas.

'One lesson learned is that it's very important to rehearse, simulate and test with all the team together,' he says.

'We put everyone on the same platform and made sure the processes and technology worked. The Games would not have worked in a separate environment.'

Like in Athens, Adiba says future Games should also minimise innovation and change management.

The lesson appears to be that simplification tends to make IT run smoothly.