B2BWorkforce - Siebel Observer

February 21, 2002

The Technology Games of the 2002 Olympics

Serious Fun

The Games People Play

The Big Money Game

The Information Games

Olympic Sized Technology

Best of Breed

The Testing Game

Inside the Command Center

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"If we do our jobs perfectly then no one will even notice we were here"

Marco de Palma
Salt Lake Organizing Committee

Events

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The Technology Games of the 2002 Olympics

Every few years, for two brief weeks, the world takes a little break from the more pressing demands of life to play a diverse set of games. During this time, such otherwise frivolous human pursuits as dressing up in fancy costumes and skating to music (ice dancing), skiing with a gun and taking occasional shots (biathlon), and throwing rocks at a target painted on the ice (curling), are packaged for our common enjoyment. Technology and customer relationship management play a role during this time that is largely hidden but increasingly central to the success of the games.

Serious Fun

In theory, the Olympics are representative of a high minded ideal. According to the Olympic Charter the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world.

"Olympism is a state of mind based on equality of sports which are international and democratic," states the International Olympic Committee (IOC) mission statement. "It is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind."

As an event designed to suspend human aggression, the movement has not had a lot of success. Some of the most desperate wars in human history have broken out since its founding and the Olympics themselves have generated a few controversies. Yet few people would question that the world is better off thanks to the Olympic movement.

Mostly this is because the Olympics are an excuse to have some serious fun. On television, the games sometimes appear sanctimonious and self-aggrandizing. In person, the games are very enjoyable and self-aggrandizing. This is because the games people play have extended beyond the events themselves.

The Games People Play

The Olympics is all about giving everyone the opportunity to play whatever game they like most and feel good about it. This was very much in evidence last week in Salt Lake City. The people who like the game of organizing were running the events, the people who like the game of volunteering were greeting people in the cold. The people who like the game of collecting things were trading pins. The people who like the game of shopping were buying Roots hats and Merrell shoes. The people who like the game of making money were scalping tickets. The elite few who like skating fast better than anything were speed skating. Everyone felt good about what they were doing because it contributed to the overall success of the event, and by extension, to a better world.

Unlike most 19th century social reform movements, the Olympics has a place in the contemporary era and is even thriving because it embraces two key elements of the modern world - big money and technology.

The Big Money Game

It is big money that allows the games to be so inclusive. The Salt Lake City Organizing Committees' budget is $1.8 billion. That is over $100 million dollars for each day of competition. This figure does not include what individuals, businesses, and governments pay to play their part.

The Olympic Movement receives most of its funding from the rights bought by broadcast networks and here is where technology first comes in. The movement also benefits from a world-wide sponsorship program comprising many multinational companies (but unfortunately not Siebel Systems).

NBC's current Olympic prime-time ratings are running 138% above the network average, 10% better than the Nagano games, and above what NBC promised advertisers. NBC is clearly winning the game of getting everyone to watch television. Despite the enormous sums being spent the advertisers, at this point, are getting more value than they paid for.

Long-term broadcast and sponsorship revenue allows the International Olympic Committee to provide the majority of the games budget up front, with revenue effectively guaranteed prior to the selection of the host city. This at the root of the competition between municipalities to influence the IOC in their favor. A competition some cities have played too hard to win.

The Salt Lake Organizing Committee (SLOC) received over $570 million from programs managed by the IOC, representing 40% of its total budget. The Athens Organizing Committee will receive approximately $960 million, roughly 60% of its operating budget from the IOC.

Funds from Olympic marketing programs also help defray National Olympic Committee costs, including the training and development of athletes and the cost of sending teams to the games. This is why competition among judges to promote their national teams is often so fierce.

The Information Games

It is information that makes the big money possible. Even the most casual visitor of the 2002 Winter Olympics soon becomes aware of the importance of technology in the modern games. Large screen televisions are everywhere including most of the venues. The events themselves require an enormous amount of information to run smoothly.

The reach of the information games is demonstrated by the controversy surrounding the pairs figure skating competition which was front page news around-the-world! The power of this reach was demonstrated when public opinion, based on what the world saw on television, forced the event to be rejudged and a pair of silver metals exchanged for gold.

Olympic Sized Technology

The game of connecting all these diverse people and activities is the job of a largely unrecognized group of people - the IT services group. The size and scale of the modern games makes the delivery of all this information a substantial undertaking. At the 2002 Winter Games it entailed building the largest telecommunications network in Utah and deploying the largest event web site ever built on the net. The total budget for IT at the 2002 Winter Games exceeded $300 million - making it the largest single item in the over all budget.

What this investment buys is:

31,200 miles of optical fiber cable,
10 million unique visitors to the web site,
20 million pages of printed reports,
20,000 tasks in the project plans,
10,000 mobile phones,
5,700 workstations and lap tops,
1,150 printers,
550 servers.

Best of Breed

Only a small percentage of SLOC�s technology budget is cash. The remainder is "value-in-kind" goods and services provided by the sponsors in exchange for Olympic marketing rights. In the past, the games information technology requirements were handled by a single company. When IBM elected not to participate in the 2002 games, this meant many of the game applications had to be built from scratch.

To complete the 2002 information technology solution, the IOC and SLOC assembled a consortium of companies, most new to the Olympics, to develop and operate the technology required for the games. They included SchlumbergerSema, Gateway, Seiko, Lucent, Qwest, Ikano, and Sun.

SchlumbergerSema provided systems integration services, systems management services, and games management systems. Gateway provided hardware deployment and support. Seiko provided timing and scoring systems. Lucent provided PBX systems. Qwest provided the data network transport and the data communications equipment. Ikano, a Utah based company, provided data network services and support. Sun provided UNIX equipment and support.

SLOC and its partners have worked very hard to create one unified project team dedicated to a common goal: successful delivery of the information. SLOC was careful to retain overall accountability and decision making authority on the project.

Work on the technology aspects of the 2002 games began in 1997 with early design and the recruitment of the key telecommunications sponsors. By late 1998, over 100 employees were working full-time on the project. By early 2001 the team had grown to over 600 people in order to deploy equipment and perform technical rehearsals and customer acceptance tests. During the Games, the number of workers exceeds 2,900 staff members, including 1,500 volunteers.

One of the key members of this team is no stranger to readers of The Siebel Observer. He is Marco de Palma, the head of RWD's Siebel practice, who is currently on leave to work on the games. We asked Marco what lessons he has learned from his Olympic experience and how they might apply to the Siebel world.

Commitment to Customer Satisfaction

One thing that de Palma made clear was that the Salt Lake Organizing Committee's commitment to the customer started at the very top of the organization. The president of the SLOC is businessman Mitt Romney, who was brought in to head the organization after a bribing scandal forced the resignation of the original president.

Before heading the organization, Mitt Romney, the son of presidential candidate George Romney, worked for many years at the management consulting and venture capital firm Bain & Company and Bain Capital.

Romney's philosophy on customer service can perhaps best be described in the one word slogan given to volunteers: CHARGE (which stands for Committed, Helpful, Adaptable, Respectful, Gracious, Enjoy - the magic ingredients of any successful game).

This philosophy had a significant impact on how the IT group deployed systems at the games.

"Technology is just a means towards an end, not an end in itself," de Palma said. "A lot of technology guys just don't understand this. They think it exists just for its own purpose."

The Testing Game

Olympics technology projects have some unique dynamics. While most projects can delay implementation when unexpected events happen, Olympic projects don�t have that luxury. They also can not work through the bugs during the first weeks new systems are live. The equipment and applications have to work right on the first day of competition.

To adapt to these dynamics, de Palma stressed the importance testing and simulation made on the game of technology. In many ways the technology testing that took place resembled a rehearsal more than it did unit, system, or stress testing.

A total of 17 official test events were conducted at Olympic venues between November 2000 and March 2001, including international competitions in freestyle skiing, cross country skiing, nordic combined, ski jumping, luge, bobsleigh, skeleton, biathlon, snowboarding, speed skating, curling, hockey and figure skating.

In September, the international sports federations, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and world news press agencies completed homologation testing, a comprehensive exercise that tested SLOC�s on-venue results systems, the press agency data feeds, and printed results applications. While numerous change requests and software bugs were logged during the test events and homologation testing, both exercises were regarded as very successful by all participants.

"Rather than just test things to make sure they worked, we tested what happened when they didn't work," said de Palma "That way technology, people, and process were all working towards a single goal. One of the things we learned was often the process needs the most tightening up. For example volunteers did not know what number to call when something went wrong and had no way to look up who to call. We had to print a whole new batch of phone directories as a result of the homologation testing we did."

Then in October and December the IT services group staged full scale rehearsals to simulate games time conditions. The first rehearsal included the participation of more than 450 SLOC staff members, IT partners, and volunteers. The second rehearsal exercised over 800 personnel at all competion venues using all the technologies and focused on the over all customer experience rather than just problem solving or testing technology.

"We threw everything we could at them," said de Palma "That way they would be confident they could solve the problem in the event something went wrong during competition."

Inside the Command Center

The results of testing can be seen in the IT command center. In an office building in downtown Salt Lake, flat screen televisions on the wall display real time television feeds of different events. Hanging between the screen are the many cloth logo banners of the different organizations represented in the center.

Space is at a premium. Jammed between the walls are rows of manned terminals monitoring every conceivable aspect of the games - the schedule, the medal results, transportation bottlenecks, network status. The feeling is not so much of typical day-to-day data center but of a NASA space mission center.

Inside the command center the mood is a mixture of tension and boredom. People are tense because they anticipate that something may happen at any moment, but bored because nothing is happening.

"If we do our jobs perfectly then no one will even notice we were here," said de Palma

For more information contact Marco via email at mdepalma@onebox.com or at his voicemail/fax phone number 866-248-7671 x 3389.

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