Atos Origin’s challenge is to create an IT solution for each Olympic Games that allows the capture and reporting of every moment of the action and brings it to the world via television and the Internet, first time, every time! This requires a blend of specialist skills and experience backed up by a complete understanding of just what the organizers, competitors and audience expect. It involves an absolute commitment with a focus on four key areas: Partnership Management, Operational Readiness, Risk Management and Change Management.
PARTNERSHIP MANAGEMENT
Few projects are delivered by a single supplier and the network of IT partners that has been brought together must work in close partnership to deliver the highest level of support and service. As the lead integrator at the Olympic Games, Atos Origin must ensure that essential information flows freely between all parties. There must be no bottlenecks at any stage. This exchange of knowledge will also serve in the future as, while working on the current Olympic Games, Atos Origin continues to consider how to apply the experience and best practices gained to the next Olympic Games project. It’s a process of continuous learning.
When the Olympic Games commence, there will be more than 4,000 IT specialists working on-site at the Technology Operation Centre and at more than 70 venues throughout Beijing and six other cities across China. About 2,500 of these will be volunteers. Atos Origin employees from around the world are taking the opportunity to work on this remarkable project and to exchange ideas, experience and culture with local experts. This ‘one team’ approach is something that Atos Origin values highly, both at the Olympic Games and when dealing with clients around the world day-to-day.
TESTING TIMES : OPERATIONAL READINESS
Going live with any project is the most challenging time. So, even though Atos Origin has the experience of several Olympiads, there is no substitute for testing. In the run-up to the Olympic Games, the company co-ordinates an exhaustive testing progrmme to ensure the exhaustive reliability of the entire system. For Beijing, this started four years in advance and saw more than 50 applications undergo 200,000 hours of testing. The deadline of 08/08/08 at 8:08pm is constantly in mind.
Managing risk: IT security at the Olympic Games
It’s an unfortunate fact that hackers and viruses represent a threat to every IT system. This is never truer than at the Olympic Games. With millions of events every day (from benign or involuntary misuse to purposeful disruption) and a massive, complex network linking hundreds of sub-systems – to each other and to the outside world – security is naturally a top priority for Atos Origin.
For Beijing 2008, the IT security team anticipates nearly 10 million filtered events per day – a threefold increase over Torino just two years earlier. For the Beijing Olympic Games, Atos Origin will introduce new intelligent processing methods to meet new challenges. The focus will be on three key IT areas: security architecture, risk management and security operations to ensure that everything is in place to respond to any potential threat from either inside or outside the network.
IT security architecture
Security is built into the infrastructure from the outset, providing a separation between the Olympic Games network and the ‘administrative’ intranet. The Olympic Games network is also segmented into security domains monitored by intrusion detection systems.
IT RISK MANAGEMENT
Assessing the risk is an essential component in the ceaseless battle to reduce it. Extensive testing before the Olympic Games means that the IT security team is able to understand what is normal activity on applications, servers, PCs and the network so that an incident can be logged when the traffic becomes abnormal. This strategy enables the IT security team to effectively respond to incidents on a prioritised basis and keep the Olympic Games IT infrastructure protected from a wide range of threats that may otherwise compromise critical IT services, including the recording and distribution of competition results.
IT security operations
Atos Origin trains the entire IT team in security policies and procedures. It is key to ensuring high awareness of everyone’s behaviours as the smallest mistake or intervention may have an unfortunate effect on the overall system. During the Olympic Games, the IT security team is operational around the clock in order to respond to any incidents that may occur, day or night.
Knowledge management
By creating a shared knowledge resource, the delivery team is able to benefit from previous experience – reducing risk, lowering costs and improving performance. Atos Origin’s Major Events Group enables knowledge-sharing through the creation of a Knowledge Management Portal to provide a single source of information in a clearly defined and organised structure that is easily accessible by all members of the project team. This makes it easier to transfer the experiences of one project to the next, encouraging best practice, supported by an ongoing analysis of each activity to determine what went well, what issues arose, how they were overcome and how those lessons can be applied to future projects.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
All large projects are subject to changing business, legislative, economic and delivery requirements that have a significant bearing upon successful completion. We define change management as the process of ensuring that the people most affected by the proposed changes are ready, willing and able to make the operational and behavioural adjustments required to deliver success.
Linked closely to knowledge management, change management requires standardised methods and procedures to minimise the disruptive impact of change whilst ensuring that the full benefit of the new system is delivered as quickly as possible.
Our programme management tools and techniques empower clients to introduce consistent disciplines and processes rapidly across the programme. With them, it is possible to create standard, efficient processes to manage issues and risks and report progress, track major dependencies across the programme, provide consolidated programme-level reporting across a range of projects and activities, and monitor benefit realisation.
Given the highly critical nature of the IT solution implemented at the Olympic Games, Atos Origin enforces a strict Change Management process to ensure that changes introduced are properly filtered and that the risk level remains under control.
Data centres
The delivery and support of data centres is at the heart of our managed operations, providing our customers with a consistent, robust and flexible resource that can be continually adjusted to remain in line with the needs of their business.
Our strategy acknowledges the growing demand for more energy-efficient systems, providing a complete lifecycle management service to upgrade, replace or take out of service those systems that have become obsolete or are no longer needed.
The Olympic Games provides a perfect demonstration of our ability to deliver solutions that provide 100 per cent availability in mission-critical environments – a skill that we are able to apply to our customers around the world.