Designing a large IT project for a global event is rather like playing a professional team sport. In both situations, the players are watching the clock while working to a "game plan" that assumes that some activities remain predictable, but others will be highly variable.

Technologists can never quite predict the outcome - either on the "go live" for a big IT project or on the day of a big game. So imagine the challenges in a situation where both these scenarios are combined in a global sporting event: with many teams from around the world playing dozens of sports alongside a massive IT project designed to support the logistical operations of those games, the media coverage and the generation of a huge volume of sport-related statistics and results.

Consider, for example, the team that developed the IT system behind the 2002 Winter Olympics held last February in Salt Lake City. The two-week event produced unexpected variables. Probably the most high-profile of those surprises was when games officials awarded a second Olympic gold medal in the pairs' skating event, following an outcry about the original results of that event.

According to Bob Cottam, the chief integrator for SchlumbergerSema at the Salt Lake City games, that possibility had not come up in any of his team's planning and testing strategy sessions.

When a medal is taken away from an athlete because of some issue, or the federation decides to issue an extra medal or change the results, then, from an IT perspective, it raised sudden complexities because the database design was not set up for two gold medals in the pairs' skating event. "That's why our guys had to go into the central database and rapidly update the central systems."

SchlumbergerSema was the worldwide IT partner and top sponsor at the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. The company led a consortium of technology companies (comprising SchlumbergerSema, Panasonic, Samsung, Xerox, Kodak, Seiko, Gateway, Wige Mic, Ikano, Sun Microsystems, Nova, AT&T, Qwest, Lucent and MSNBC) to provide products and services that supported what SchlumbergerSema boasts is "the world's largest sports- related IT contract".

Mr Cottam said that if he had any advice for anyone developing IT systems to support major international sporting events, it would be: be prepared for anything.

"We considered a whole range of scenarios. We did a lot of test events with the IOC, plus technical rehearsals where we threw all sorts of scenarios at ourselves to see what we would when things went wrong," he says.

"We let people pull plugs and we would switch from systems A to B and re-route data traffic. So we aimed to be to flexible, but I have to admit that issuing two gold medals for one event wasn't one of our scenarios. You test, test and test - and you do all manner of scenarios, yet there is always the unexpected."

Sometimes the IT problems at a big sporting event are entirely predictable, but that may not prevent them from occurring. Consider, for example, the controversy caused by the design of the official website for the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia.

The website failed to provide the right quality of access for blind or partially sighted people who use specialised "plug-ins" within web browsers to enable screen text to be "read" to them on websites designed to support this function.

This failure led to a complaint being filed with the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission under the Australian Disability Discrimination Act of 1992 - and $20,000 in damages were awarded to the complainant.

In making the award of damages, inquiry commissioner William Carter expressed views that will assist anyone designing a website for a major sporting event.

The complainant's expectation of being able to participate at the Sydney Olympics as a sighted person might do so, was unmistakable, he wrote, "and I am comfortably satisfied that his limited access to the website caused him considerable feelings of hurt, humiliation and rejection."

"One cannot overstate the consequential effect upon him of having to cope with the persistent need to counter what he saw as a negative, unhelpful and dismissive attitude on the part of an organisation charged with the presentation of the most notable sporting event in the history of this country.

"This, in my view, was aggravated by his final inability to obtain the desired access to the website, in spite of his having established to the satisfaction of the Commission the fact that he had been unlawfully discriminated against."

The next big sporting event that has been gearing up to meet the IT system challenge is the 2002 football World Cup - an event which is also drawing a lot of attention from IT professionals.

Mark Lancaster, chairman and chief executive of SDL International (whose company is producing the William Hill World Cup website), says there are considerable challenges in producing sites that have a global level of participation.

During the 1998 World Cup, website viewing figures for the official World Cup soared to 1.1bn page impressions over 33 days, but this year the number is expected to be much higher.

This year the football association, FIFA, web site for the tournament (www.fifaworldcup.com) is for the first time translated into five languages (English, Spanish, French, Japanese and Korean) - evidence that groups involved in the World Cup are "beginning to take multilingual web content seriously", says Mr Lancaster.

"FIFA should really lead by example and use the World Cup as an opportunity to communicate effectively on a truly global level," he adds.

"Given that China has also qualified for the World Cup for the first time, content in Chinese is clearly needed, as it is one of the most widely used languages in the world."

Both linguistic and cultural issues are involved, especially in the design of websites for different international audiences. Mr Lancaster adds that businesses involved in promoting global sporting events should plan early for translation requirements and cultural adaptations to avoid potentially damaging miscommunications.

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