Management Information Systems
CASE – 1 The 2004 Athens Olympics Network: Faster, Stronger—and Redundant
Claude Philipps, program director of major events at Atos Origin, the lead IT contractor for the Olympic Games, likes to be prepared. “We were ready before August, but we were still testing, because we wanted to be sure that every stupid thing that can happen was planned for,” Philipps said. “In a normal IT project, we could have delivered the application to the customer almost eight months earlier.”
But the Olympic Games was far from a normal IT project. The deadline was nonnegotiable, and there were no second chances: Everything must work, from the opening ceremony on August 13 right to the end, said Philipps, whose previous experience includes developing the control system for the world’s first computerized nuclear power plant.
With all that pressure, Philipps’s team was doing its utmost to ensure that the network would not fail. They were building multiple layers of security and redundancy, using reliable technology, and then testing it rigorously.
In the weeks before the games, the team went through two technical rehearsals in which 30 Atos Origin staffers put the network through its paces. The team spent a full week stimulating the busiest days of the games, Philipps said, dealing with “crazy scenarios of what might happen in every area: a network problem, staff stopped in a traffic jam, a security attack…everything that might happen.”
The rehearsals were intended to test people and procedures as much as the hardware and software. That was important because the IT organization Philipps built for the Athens Olympics grew from nothing to a staff of 3,400 in less than three years.
The two major components of the software that were run over the Olympic network were Atos Origin’s GMS (Games Management System), a customized suite of applications that acts as kind of ERP for the Olympics, and the IDS (Information Diffusion System).
GMS ran on Windows 2000 servers in Athens, an
Claude Philipps, program director of major events at Atos Origin, the lead IT contractor for the Olympic Games, likes to be prepared. “We were ready before August, but we were still testing, because we wanted to be sure that every stupid thing that can happen was planned for,” Philipps said. “In a normal IT project, we could have delivered the application to the customer almost eight months earlier.”
But the Olympic Games was far from a normal IT project. The deadline was nonnegotiable, and there were no second chances: Everything must work, from the opening ceremony on August 13 right to the end, said Philipps, whose previous experience includes developing the control system for the world’s first computerized nuclear power plant.
With all that pressure, Philipps’s team was doing its utmost to ensure that the network would not fail. They were building multiple layers of security and redundancy, using reliable technology, and then testing it rigorously.
In the weeks before the games, the team went through two technical rehearsals in which 30 Atos Origin staffers put the network through its paces. The team spent a full week stimulating the busiest days of the games, Philipps said, dealing with “crazy scenarios of what might happen in every area: a network problem, staff stopped in a traffic jam, a security attack…everything that might happen.”
The rehearsals were intended to test people and procedures as much as the hardware and software. That was important because the IT organization Philipps built for the Athens Olympics grew from nothing to a staff of 3,400 in less than three years.
The two major components of the software that were run over the Olympic network were Atos Origin’s GMS (Games Management System), a customized suite of applications that acts as kind of ERP for the Olympics, and the IDS (Information Diffusion System).
GMS ran on Windows 2000 servers in Athens, an