The Winter Olympics 2002: The IT chief speaks to silicon.com

You've got a budget of $300m and a deadline which is unbreakable. Your IT department has 3,000 people in it. You have to manage 145 Unix boxes, 4,500 workstations and laptops, 1,210 printers, and 1,850 fax machines and copiers.

You're also in charge of 40 applications containing 10 million lines of code. Then there's the small matter of 10,000 cellular phones and 14,200 desktop phones. And you're also responsible for a 32,000 mile long fibre optic cable running between 40 different locations linking everything together.

Fancy that challenge? It's one which Bob Cottam, SchlumbergerSema's chief integrator for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, boldly accepted.

silicon.com managed to grab a few minutes of his valuable time over the weekend to gain an insight into how he did it...

Has the experience of managing such a huge project matched your expectations?
Yes, but the challenges have been slightly different. All large IT projects have similar challenges due to their size and nature. The Olympics is unique in that the end date does not and will not change. No excuses here: 8 February was set in stone.

Biggest problem you had to overcome?

This was the setting up here. As you may know, Salt Lake is the first of four Games for SchlumbergerSema. When I came here on the 1 February 1999, we had nothing. We have made huge strides forward we have developed, tested and integrated our software, we have set up and have working our facilities such as our test lab, primary and secondary data centres, PC factory and our information technology centre (ITC). Our ITC is the mission control centre for all our hardware, software and networking equipment. We have 100 staff working 24/seven, we use all sorts of monitoring software to check the health of all our equipment.

Biggest surprise?

The organisers have taken the best of breed approach, which means working with many different types of companies and cultures. This can be difficult. However, we have taken the 'one team' approach and all worked closely together.

Any disasters you can mention?

Integrating large complex software solutions is always challenging. We anticipated this and built a large test lab. Pulling the software together had challenges but these were all overcome with our comprehensive testing programme and technical rehearsals.

Thing you're most proud of...?

Hitting our final deadlines and bringing our system to production on 6 February.

Lessons learnt? Anything you could take with you into a 'normal' corporate environment...?

Working together as one team with a common goal. And you can never have a big enough test lab: you must test, test and test some more, and when you think you have done enough do more.

You can't afford anything to go wrong - presumably the testing you went through was extensive?

We did over 100,000 hours over the last 18 months, so yes.

What sort of back-up do you have in place should the main systems fail?

We have A and B systems in our primary data centre, and we have a secondary data system at another location.

Was it frustrating for you having the choice of supplier limited by commercial concerns rather than technical excellence (not that they're mutually exclusive, of course...)?

At the start it was, as we to waited and see who signed up. But once companies have signed they are 110 per cent, which makes up.

What are the biggest differences between these Games and previous ones (from an IT perspective)?

Difficult to say as we were not told what IBM used. We use standard commercial products and software, ie. Unix, NT, Oracle, Java etc. We have built some new applications which we did with our customers, so our look and feel is different from the last.

What's your typical working day during the Games?

We work 24/seven: two shifts of 10 hours, one graveyard shift for system housekeeping and back-ups.

You're a Brit abroad - any particular cultural issues?

No, I have found Utah a very nice place with friendly people.

Do you actually like winter sports?
Yes.

Would you do it all over again?
Yes, I am off to Turin in August.