Agile technology powering London 2012

As the East End of London 2012 Olympic Games site goes through a transformation from a fly-tipping wasteland into a green landscaped space for the London 2012 Games, JISC Inform reports on how shared services and partnership will be the success to delivering a seamless experience for athletes and spectators.

‘When the entire world is watching, you only get once chance to get it right.’ is the closing strapline on Atos Origin’s promotional showreel for how and why performance and speed is so crucial when you have an audience of over 4 billion watching live, there is no option but for the technology to work.

For Peter Hamilton, integration director at Atos Origin, London 2012 is his ninth Olympics. ‘Each Games bring their own challenges, but we bring our knowledge and expertise from each to improve the next,’ he says. ‘We have a team of around 80 people of which 10-15 have previous games experience. These individuals are working four years in advance to deliver the vast IT system that relays results, events and athlete information to spectators and media around the world.’

Atos Origin is the worldwide information technology partner for the International Olympic Committee and has the technology partner contract for the Olympics until Rio in 2016. ‘It means we are able to bring expertise and knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. We know where there is room for compromise in working with different countries and cultures and where we need to tell people that this is how this technology is going to work because it has to in this way.

‘We know that there will be things that go wrong during the Olympics but we focus on how we are going to fix it. We work as a team across all the technology partner organisations and under the direction of the technology department of the Olympics organising committee to deliver a seamless experience and often we only have minutes to make that decision and make it work,’ said Hamilton.

‘At one Olympics we had built the applications and systems that captured the results for the swimming heats. At one particular Olympics, we knew we only had capacity for 12 heats in the system – but there were 13 heats and we had 20 minutes before the 13th race – which included all of the fastest swimmers. We knew we didn’t have time to put the technical fix in place so we photocopied the athletes’ details and timings, reverted back to paper and circulated the results to the commentators to read out. No matter what the situation we have to deliver.

‘We always have a plan B and in some cases a plan C. We spend over 200,000 hours testing, rehearsing scenarios and planning for the expected as well as the unexpected to deliver real time and accurate information.’ he added.

But how can UK colleges and universities learn from the 2012 Olympics?

The business model for Atos Origins revolves around working with local partners who deliver hardware or the infrastructure such as Acer or Cisco. Atos Origins then hires the cabling where appropriate and increasingly looks at utilising virtualisation and delivering the services through the cloud as well as through users own computers rather than providing the hardware.

While listening to Peter speak about how Atos Orgin delivers the technology for the Olympics it was interesting to hear that they ‘don’t work at the cutting edge ever...that is deliberate to keep stable. New technologies can help and we do upgrade from Games to Games, but we are doing this between Games as we have to deliver and there need to know that our systems are robust and will deliver.’

This is a view that is shared by Derek Drury CIO at University of Salford, ‘When we are looking at upgrading or renewing our IT infrastructure, like the Olympics, we must also ensure we deliver business as usual for our learners and academic staff. We have the added challenge of balancing the need to upgrade over time with integrating new as well as legacy systems. So although we always look to innovate and ensure that we deliver cutting edge products and services across the university, we also take a managed risk approach which might mean we’re not necessarily always using the most recent software release.’

Atos Origin is responsible for the coordination, deployment, implementation and operation of the IT systems at all Games venues, as a result they are an expert in project management.

Hamilton explains, ‘A project of this scale always presents challenges and some risk. Key to success is: planning, testing and risk management. We always remember that each venue is equally as important as the other.’ When it comes to the technology we have dual systems A and B – if one goes down we can go to B.’

In offering advice to universities and colleges who might be facing the same challenges of working with a variety of different technologies Peter’s advice to gain seamless working across spilt locations is:

With a consortium of eight technology partners, the secret to success is equal teamwork and maybe even stronger than that demonstrated by those athletes competing for gold in the team events.

Communication and focussing on our joint goals is key. We begin with very clearly defined roles and responsibilities from the outset.

Working effectively as a team is not only a win-win proposition; it’s a vital part of our culture. Managing the people, projects, processes and IT for the Olympic Games is our reference for success in implementing large scale and multi-vendor projects for businesses operating anywhere in the world.

Hamilton concludes, ‘Everything we do is reducing risk and transferring knowledge and experience. It is all about our experience and risk management. You can’t have fights with people as it just won’t work. We have to work together and we all have to make compromises in everything that we do.

‘There is nothing that compares to delivering the Olympics in your own country and we are giving London 2012 the tools to make it work.’

JISC works to support universities and colleges with providing a seamless learning, teaching and research environment through the use of technology. Our work to support institutions become more agile includes toolkits and guides on how to integrate existing technologies through to what to consider when making your next upgrade.

Use #jiscinform31 when sharing this article on Twitter or on blog posts.