IT’s role in Beijing Olympics
August 28, 2008 by Raj Sheelvant
InformationWeek’s IT Olympics Weblog quotes some of the stats as shown below from the Paris base IT service company called Atos Origin that managed the IT infrastructure at Beijing Olympics.
- Systems in Beijing securely processed a more than 80% greater volume of data on competition for media and news agencies worldwide, compared with the Olympics in Athens.
- The IT infrastructure in Beijing enabled nearly 50% more stories to be published each day in English by the Olympic News Service, totaling an average of 500 stories each day during the Games.
- Atos Origin added 40% more sports disciplines to its Commentator Information System to provide broadcasters with more detailed, real-time information about more sporting events.
- IT supported about 30% more hits on the intranet for the Beijing Games, called INFO2008, averaging about 1.2 million hits each day.
- Systems collected and filtered more than 12 million information security events each day to protect against potential IT security threats. Of these, fewer than 100 were identified as real issues. All of these were resolved, according to Atos Origin, resulting in no impact on the Olympics.
In planning and managing a mega events like the Olympics, IT is going to play more and more central role. IT in the past could not be used because hardware was expensive. As IT hardware becomes cheaper and smaller, IT can successfully be used to ease the management of huge amount of data and information during a mega event. Also, maturing Business Intelligence (BI) tools can be used successfully to find bottleneck issues before they happen thus streamlining the event. The Web 2.0 technology which is built on a foundation of open collaboration and communication can also be successfully used to exploit collective intelligence of the crowd and fine tune the event to their changing taste.
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