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RSS feedsIT Week: As managing consultant and senior producer of Web Application Services and Digital Content Innovation at IBM, can you explain your role at Wimbledon.org?
Andy Burns: I'm IBM's web consultant for Wimbledon.org, part of the core IBM team here. We look at how technology can help [the All England Lawn Tennis Association's] business. Through the year there are about five or six of us and my specific area is the web site, which is one of four Grand Slam sites that IBM is involved in, each one trying to achieve something different. Our designers work on the look and feel for Wimbledon, which is very traditional. It's all about keeping [the site] clean and pristine and free of ads. Because many people can't get to Wimbledon [the web site] is about extending the brand to people so they can experience [the event].
How do you cope with peaks and troughs in demand?
In 2005 the site had 4.5 million unique visitors and 30 million visits, which equates to 200 million page views in two weeks – it's the largest site of all the four Grand Slam tournaments. A lot of this is due to the timing – games are played when people are at work in the UK, or at work in the US, where they [often] have no access to other media. Because we've been doing tennis traffic for so long [we can predict] that the peaks will occur in the final week, but it can be player-driven so if [many of] the good ones are knocked out that can influence the traffic. We make estimates on traffic and scale it up each year.
Do you try to include Web 2.0 techniques and other new technologies
to showcase your expertise?
If we decide there are good business benefits [to be gained] from moving the
technology forward then we would but the site is doing very well at what it does
– it is reasonably traditional and quite flat. We have RSS feeds in place this y
ear and we're using more Flash than in recent years because it can [achieve]
more visually stimulating features, but generally we start off by seeing if
there is a business requirement and then choose the technology to meet that
need. It's difficult for IBM because we want to be showcasing our technology,
but we're primarily here [to service the client].
What are the benefits of organisations such as the All England Lawn Tennis Association outsourcing their web sites?
Wimbledon has a small IT team [and can't scale up for the summer demand]. When IBM is at full strength here there are about 130 people and many more worldwide working on web farms in our server infrastructure. So we can ramp up [in various areas] according to what is important, and in working with IBM, organisations can also use new technology and benefit from stuff we use at other events. For example, Wimbledon is the first event to use our content management system [CMS].
How does that work?
We make over 200,000 content changes a day to the site and have a team of content managers publishing using our CMS, which [does not require] the IT team to help them. The Wimbledon intranet, called the Wimbledon Information System [WIS], is also available to security staff, referees and others on PDAs.
About Andy Burns
Andy Burns is managing consultant and senior producer for the Digital Content
and Innovation Practice at IBM Global Business Services.
Burns has more than 17 years experience in IT.
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