IT boost for Olympics

When the torch is dimmed at the end of next month's summer Olympic Games in Sydney, it will mark the beginning of a new era in the movement's approach to handling the information technology on which it has become increasingly dependent.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) - which awards the responsibility for each games to an organising committee and, since Atlanta, has set up a co-ordinating role for IT - is moving away from what it sees as costly, monolithic, Olympic-specific systems that are used once and then virtually redesigned from scratch four years later.

Instead, it will focus on using commercially-available packaged systems that are used all year and are independent of hardware, and on re-using as much of the technology as possible.

It is a strategy put in place by a lot of companies around the world, argues Mr Philippe Verveer, the IOC's director of technology, although he admits it is innovative for an international sporting event.

The new approach will be adopted for the Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City in 2002. This will be the first time that an international sporting event has drawn up its own strategy, rather than relying on its marketing department to find suppliers willing to pay for the privilege of providing free products and services.

As a result, the IOC is revising its relationship with its technology suppliers. For the last eight years IBM has acted as systems integrator and has provided the entire information technology infrastructure and applications under a long-term deal designed to reduce costs and risks.

However, the company - which has been involved in every summer and winter games since Squaw Valley in 1960 - has decided not to exercise its option to continue for another four years.

"We were not truly successful in reducing costs and risk with IBM and it was limiting transfers of technology between games," admits Mr Verveer. "Critical systems were rewritten from scratch, so we didn't get the continuity we were expecting. After the problems in Atlanta in 1996, the last winter games in Nagano were a success, but an expensive one for both the organisers and for IBM."

After 16 years with IBM and six years with Gillette, Mr Verveer joined the organising committee for the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville in France. Subsequently he was IT director for France 98, the football World Cup. He was appointed to his current position last July after a period as consultant to the organising committee of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, to be held in 2002.

Part of the problem with providing systems for the games has been that each event is run by a separate organising committee that sets up, spends seven years organising its event and then disappears. After Atlanta, the IOC set up Mr Verveer's directorate in order to be involved in selection of critical technology solutions, especially the information systems. It wanted to re-use as much of the technology as possible and transfer knowledge from one event to the next organising committee.

Ten years ago, hardware was the critical component, but today it is becoming more of a commodity, he says. Services and delivery of applications are now more critical and the IOC has started to implement a new strategy by selecting Sema, a services company, to provide systems integration, operations, games' management and information delivery systems.

Although Sema has elected to replace IBM as an Olympic partner, the highest level of sponsorship in the Olympic movement, Mr Verveer insists that the company would still have been selected on merit. The cost of providing information technology is very high, and the IOC has to find a way to finance it, so it naturally seeks a marketing agreement. "If for any reason that was not possible, we would finance the technology with the television rights or through another sponsor," says Mr Verveer.

In fact, the IOC is partly doing this at Salt Lake City. Although Gateway, the US personal computer manufacturer, will provide and support thousands of personal computers and Windows servers, the organising committee will purchase Unix servers for the most important systems and databases.

The success of the new strategy will become apparent only when most of the critical solutions have been re-used for one or two games. "We are organising a sporting event, not a technology fair, so its success is measured on the field of play," says Mr Verveer.