An On-Loan Kind Of Guy

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By Robin Nelson
Issue date: July 1, 1996

The IS director of the Games, Bob Neal, is perhaps the most visible of executives on loan to the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG). An IBMer, Neal functions as a virtual outsourced CIO, dealing with the many sponsors that are supplying information technology for the Olympics, IBM among them.

To be fully effective in this role, the soft-spoken former aerospace engineer and college instructor had to gain credibility with rival technology sponsors that initially were inclined to typecast him strictly as IBM's man in Atlanta. "Quite candidly, that was a challenge to begin with," Neal recalls. "Back in the fall of 1991 when I started in the job, I know a lot of the other sponsors were wondering if someone could come in, take his corporate hat off, put on the ACOG hat, and truly represent all the sponsors impartially. I simply had to prove over time that I could do that."

Even IBM was concerned, Neal acknowledges, to the extent that it conducted its own poll of sponsors to evaluate the impartiality of his performance, a test Neal passed with flying colors--in part because of his ability to communicate openly and frankly with the representatives from other vendors. "We [all] have a very open, candid relationship now," he says. "I have signed an ACOG nondisclosure agreement, and I treat IBM the same as all the other technology sponsors."

But that's only half the battle. Neal, like any conventional CIO, wants a system so quiet that nobody knows it's there--and certainly not one that becomes vis ible at the expense of the Games during operation. Yet the technology suppliers, IBM most of all, need to showcase their products and services in every conceivable manner to justify the high cost of association.

"It obviously puts some additional pressure on this job," Neal admits, "when one of the challenges is to balance the showcase needs of the sponsors with ACOG's need to make sure that we blend into the background through the use of proven technologies. I can only tell you that it is very much a balancing act."

Nominally, Neal is the enforcer of the International Olympic Committee's dictum, through ACOG, that only technologies in a commercial production environment at the end of 1994 could be considered for inclusion in the Games' systems. "We looked at a lot of technologies and found a number that were not far enough along," Neal says, "but we did make a few exceptions."

One of the exceptions happens to reside in an IBM object-oriented development tool for building multimedia information so lutions, running under OS/2. It's used in touch-screen kiosk displays as well as within correspondent (press/media) information systems and for some innovative official scoring data entry in a GUI environment.

Did IBM get a break from its on-loan guy on the inside? "When we originally got it, the product was in the alpha and beta release stages of the code, but it was very important for IBM to showcase its object-oriented, client-server technology," Neal says without hesitation. "We looked at it and, with IBM, determined that the risk was manageable."

His principal concern on the eve of the Games, Neal says, will be that "everything and everybody is in place and ready to go."

See next story in our special report: " Games On The Web "

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