Interview: Gerry Pennell, chief information officer, London Olympics

No one's task ahead of the Olympics in 2012 is quite as technologically complex as that of Locog's Gerry Pennell as he gears up to get the games running like clockwork

For many organisations, the start of the London Olympics in 2012 is a deadline. TFL wants to introduce contactless payments, Scotland Yard has said it is the biggest policing challenge ever to face Britain and the BBC will scale up its online offering using cloud services during what will be a period of unprecedented internet viewing.

But no organisation is working quite as hard towards the event as the one tasked with managing the technology behind it, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games. Locog’s CIO is Gerry Pennell and his wall-sized project timeline is testament to the scale of the task ahead of him.

Pennell explains that his experience as a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he specialised in programme management of post-merger integrations within the financial sector, combined with his work as a CIO of the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games, gave him invaluable experience for his current position.

“My experience as CIO of the Commonwealth Games was directly relevant, but the Olympics is clearly much bigger. It is three or four times as big in terms of the sports and media visiting, but it is actually more than 10 times as big if you look at the profile and the degree of press interest,” he says.

Pennell moved from the Co-op, where he worked as CIO, to Locog in September 2008. He initially led a team of 60, but this has been ramped up to 130 and will rise to 330 people by July 2012. This does not include the 2,500 people working for suppliers, or the many thousands of volunteers currently being recruited to help with technology, estimated to reach between 4,500 and 5,000.

Technology elements
The Olympics tends to retain much of its technology from the previous games, but Pennell explains that his team has been tasked with upgrading a significant element of the event, the Commentator Information System.

This system is a Java-based platform developed by Atos Origin that collects and delivers competition results to many different recipients. It must therefore understand the rules of the sport, the scoring system and the qualification stages of the event. It also contains information on each of the athletes, their personal bests, as well as national and Olympic records.

“Any sports event has a system of this sort. However, there are more than 300 events at the London Olympics. It is therefore on a different scale,” says Pennell.

The data is collated in a central repository and then made available via the Olympic Data Feed. This is an XML-based feed delivered to many different recipients, including the news wires, press agencies, as well as the international federation, the Olympics web site and the web sites of rights holding broadcasters. The data will also be made available on scoreboards around the site for the benefit of the competition managers.

“This feed will give consistency across different users of data and replaces the variety of one-off interfaces that had been used at previous Olympics. This has been redesigned and is a significant step forward,” says Pennell.

In addition, a combination of technology suppliers including Panasonic will be tasked with deploying video boards, scoreboards, audio technology and televisions. Mobile phones will be provided by Samsung.

New network provider
Another change has been with the network provider. “Clearly we have our own country specific telecoms and communications provider in BT,” says Pennell.

BT is providing and managing the voice and data networks, internet access and landlines required across all of the Olympic venues and facilities. There are 92 buildings to be connected and BT is investing 640,000 man hours in the project.

Pennell says that the telecoms system that will be used at the event is the same as that used at the Locog headquarters in Canary Wharf. “The data network has to be designed to connect all the venues together in a highly resilient way, but on one level we know it works because we’re using it here,” he says.

BT will work with hardware provider Cisco to deliver two infrastructure networks that are separated at the Local Area Network level to support the delivery and connected presentation of the games.

Interview: Gerry Pennell, chief information officer, London Olympics

No one's task ahead of the Olympics in 2012 is quite as technologically complex as that of Locog's Gerry Pennell as he gears up to get the games running like clockwork

Over the airwaves
There will also be a radio trunked network provided by British company Airwave. This is a computer-controlled radio system that uses a few channels of radio spectrum and will be used by stewards and the emergency services. The control channel computer sends tagged packets of data to enable a group to communicate with others in that group.

Software developer Omega is working with the team on developing a series of about 100 applications required to support the games. This includes software to help track medical encounters and ensure that staff are given appropriate access to events and locations.

Other pieces of technology were created and used during other Olympic games, one of these is the volunteer portal created by Atos Origin. For London 2012 it will manage volunteer staff of up to 70,000 during the games.

Called The Games Maker, the site launched on 15 September and will enable volunteers to track their applications online. Once allocated a role they will be able to find out what the role entails and garner information on training from the system.

But are there likely to be financial concerns in light of the public sector cuts due to be announced this month?

Pennell explains that this is not a problem because Locog raises its funds via ticket sales and marketing rights.

The budget for technology will remain unchanged at around a quarter of the total budget for the organising committee (this stands at £2.1m).

However, Pennell qualifies this. “I should say that a considerable amount of the budget is not cash that we have to spend but value in kind, we have several sponsorship deals, with the likes of Panasonic and Cisco,” he says.

“They provide us with services and technology and get marketing rights. Money does not change hands but we recognise these deals in the budget.”

And with the programme ticking along like a stopwatch, is Pennell enjoying himself? His response could have been given by one of the Olympic athletes themselves: “Well, put it this way, we have to perform perfectly on the day, and everyone will be watching.”

He adds dryly: “It’s arguably the best job in IT.”