Olympic area revamps technology

Country park updates systems to deal with environmental and sporting demands

Lee Valley Regional Park Authority (LVRPA) is overhauling its IT to handle the environmental regeneration and management of sports grounds that will be used for the London Olympics in 2012.

Working with IT consultancy NCC Group, the country park authority has

installed a new infrastructure to support finance and human resources applications, and is now looking to implement a geographical information system to improve the management of the 10,000-acre, 26-mile-long area in north-east London, Essex and Hertfordshire.

Until recently, LVRPA was using outdated technology and wanted to modernise its systems to meet increasing pressures, according to Simon Sheldon, the authority’s head of finance.

‘Because of the size of the park, we are geographically dispersed and our business units and managers need to be able to act on information at relatively short notice,’ Sheldon said.

‘A big part of the project has been establishing a wide area network (Wan) where all our information can travel around quite fast, including voice over IP.’

The Wan has improved communication between the LVRPA’s two main sites in the north and south of Lee Valley that use a 100 Mbit/s link to keep information flowing freely at all times, Sheldon says.

‘In the past, my IT staff have had to run all over the place, now, with the strength and size of the connections, they can carry out a lot more of their support work remotely,’ he said.

Among the newest innovations have been broadband links to allow senior management to work from home and outside of normal office hours, and a trial of BlackBerry email devices to keep key personnel in closer touch.

The organisation has a lot of remote workers who are out in the park carrying out tasks where they need to record information and keep in contact with the office, Sheldon says.

‘Feedback from people using the BlackBerrys is that they are spot-on for what we need,’ he said.