2001: Beijing Organizing Committee initiated the planning for technology for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG).
2002: The technical meeting witnessed discussions on systems design and applications, the management of system integrators and vendors, previous experiences in Sydney Olympics and the resulting changes in core Olympic systems. The organizers were also concerned with how IT could play a role in reducing the environmental impact of the Games. It followed the discussions about the budding technologies that would prevail in 2008; like wireless broadband. As BOCOG was enthusiastic to use the latest technology to showcase China's sophistication, the team tried to figure out what would likely be well established in five years' time.
2003: The first milestone for the Beijing IT team was reached with the formulation of the preliminary IT master plan. Two key applications were developed - Games Management Systems (GMS) and Information Diffusion Systems (IDS).
One important challenge was getting the right team together early on. It was impossible, to know exactly what skills would be required four years before the event because there would always be situations that have not been planned for. The team would need people who are flexible, can use their initiative, and who are prepared to go a bit further to make sure everything goes well.
2004: The tech team received a small core group of Chinese engineers. Another vendor Atos also established a team onsite in Beijing from October that year.
2005: The IT Masterplan and integration testing strategy had been defined. Atos also delivered its first GMS module, which supported BOCOG in managing the accommodation for athletes and officials.
2006: Atos personnel opened the integration lab and made its first software delivery for the IDS.
2007: Most of the software development was in the "production" phase by that time, and the primary data center was also set up. In August - a year-long testing, of IT infrastructure supporting the Games, commenced.
2008: The technology partners worked with BOCOG on two technical rehearsals, to ensure that processes are in place, to manage any technical difficulties and provide seamless delivery of varied services to different groups of Olympic users. The IT team spent the two months up to the games installing the final pieces of infrastructure and equipment needed for the four-week event. Suppliers have also been training staff and volunteers, as well as ironing out technical glitches.
The second technical rehearsal was done in June. All competition venues were involved in the trial run, but some media areas and non-competition zones were not complete. Since the rehearsal, IT staff had been busy installing equipment and linking it up to the infrastructure. Some media areas were finished only once the media teams arrived in Beijing in the last week before the opening of the Olympics.
Three weeks before the games the technology operations centre started working 24 hours a day.
In last week, IT staff entered tons of data into the information systems, such as athlete biographies and previous world records. Everything had to be double-checked to ensure it was correct, as this information was to be matched up with results as they come in during the games.
Security was a big issue for the Olympics. Computer Associates provided the software for a monitoring system, and Atos Origin applied the configurations on top of the software that allowed staff to correlate the millions of IT events that happened each day.
The biggest challenge of the last few weeks was the logistics in accrediting athletes, officials and media from all over the world.
The Olympics IT systems were powered by Lenovo SureServers responsible for handling hundreds of thousands of requests per second, covering everything from scores to athlete biographical information. The hardware configuration supported 23 million live queries simultaneously.
The amount of testing was much more than ever done in the past. The Technology Operations Center for the Games, was about 30 percent bigger than the previous Games. To BOCOG's credit no milestone was missed.
All eyes were on the participants at Beijing's Olympic Games, but the performance of the IT systems running the event played a critical part in ensuring its success.
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