Saying "SNAFU" in Chinese

Heqiao Tower, Guanghua Road, Beijing
Waiting for another meeting to start
1535 hrs.

Melinda Liu over at Newsweek blogs on the run-up to the Olympics in her Countdown to Beijing blog. Covering the Olympic ticket website meltdown, Melinda asks some really good questions.

She also quotes yours truly.

BOCOG Don't Get Web.

Worth a read. Her point is simple: right now everyone here is wondering what has gone wrong with the systems at BOCOG to allow this to happen. Clearly, the IT problem stems as much from radically incorrect assumptions about website usage, if not a complete breakdown of communications between the people building the web capability and the people giving them orders.

It would be really easy to point the finger at the IT suppliers, system integrators, and the like. Ugly truth time: Lenovo has the institutional memory of all of IBM's past Olympic IT sponsorships on their side. It strains credulity to believe the problem was the lack of advice from the tech team.

I think the issue is more systemic: none of the old folks running BOCOG - or even the IOC - truly understand how much of an online Olympics this is going to be. If 8 million people hitting the site sounds like a lot, what about 80 million, or 280 million, on the day of the opening ceremonies?

Good Morning, gentlemen. This is your Wake Up Call

The ticketing fiasco is a wake up call. BOCOG should by now realize that the online infrastructure for these games will be just as critical as the new airport, the new venues, the new public transport, and new hotels. Failure to address these issues will leave as much egg on Beijing's face come next August as any problems in meatspace.

Comments

[Richard Ford]

You'd have thought that the stuff ups in Atlanta (I still remember trying to use "push" technology back then with PointCast) would be enough. That and the fact that pretty much most of the people building, designing, managing all aspects of the Beijing games were plucked right from the Sydney games, for obvious reasons.

So how is it, that with a legacy of excellence with all the Aussies involved and then the history of stuff ups with Atlanta and to a lesser degree Athens, that in spite of all the window dressing going up (re: Liang Ma Qiao Street and the glass exo-skeletons being put down over the old buildings in a bid to avoid being "chai'd" - that such an obvious and fundamental issue could be so poorly mismanaged. Especially given that an online mess up will reach a larger audience and cause more embarrassment than any beggar or Jian Bing salesman on the street.