Special Olympics CIO: Andre Mendes

Dan Farber: Andre, thanks for joining me.

Andre Mendes: It's my pleasure, Dan. Thanks for inviting me.

Dan Farber: The Special Olympics is really one of the important non-profits in the world. It brings together all these intellectually disabled people to compete in these events; can you give us a little bit more about the number of people who participate and some of the venues that you are using?

Andre Mendes: Sure. The Special Olympics is represented all over the world and we currently have approximately 2.8 million athletes that are enrolled in our programs and that train on a regular basis and then participate in competitions. Those competitions range all the way from your local middle school, community activity places, all the way to the world games that are held very much like the Olympics on a four year cycle. It is a tremendous breadth of activities that takes place in the realm of this organization.

Dan Farber: Like the Olympics, it is a very international event and I would guess that there is a lot of technology that you need to apply to pull off these events.

Andre Mendes: Absolutely. To give you an example, the last set of World Games that we conducted in Shanghi at the end of 2007 was an event that had venues spread over about 1200 square miles and 19 Shanghi districts. We utilized over 70 venues for all of the sports that are included in our calendar. It was a process that required a tremendous amount of logistics and coordination.

Dan Farber: Let's dive into that a little bit--about some of the technologies and how you were able to wire up all those venues and get the data flowing. And dealing with, I would assume, bandwidth that has some irregularities.

Andre Mendes: Yes, it was interesting because in Shanghi we got a tremendous amount of cooperation both from Shanghi Telecom and the government of the city, and also from the Chinese Federal Government. We had a battalion of people from the Red Army and from volunteer organizations in China with networking knowledge that went about wiring all of the venues and making sure the connectivity was appropriate. Interestingly enough, the time to bring up a circuit under those circumstances was actually rather small, rather short. We were able to bring everything online without too much difficulty.

Dan Farber: Is it different being in a nonprofit than in a for-profit company in terms of the kinds of resources that you have that you can utilize?

Andre Mendes: It is, for example again going back to Shanghi, if we were a for-profit organization we would have gone in there and established a client-provider relationship with Shanghi Telecom and we would have gone through the typical process of procuring circuits and having the installation schedules and so on. With a not-for-profit that is working so closely with a city government and a federal government, what you find is a tremendous amount of cooperation where people volunteer their time after working hours to wire these circuits. People make sure that things happen without all of the perils of bureaucracy that tend to impinge upon a customer-provider relationship. The spirit of co-operation really drives things more than anything else.

Dan Farber: You have an event coming up in Idaho in February of 2009. What are some of the issues that you have in developing that venue, and are there any new technologies that you are applying to get more efficiency or lower your cost?

Andre Mendes: Some of the issues associated with conducting winter games in a resort like that, with Sun Valley and Tamarack, are that the connectivity between locations where we have the equipment at the data center and some of the competition venues is not optimal. We have gone through all kinds of different methodologies for data transport that you find in a regular city. Besides typical T1 circuits, we have made use of wireless transmission. We are making use of microwave in some places. We basically have brought out the entire panoply of potential communication solutions out there to resolve contact between remote locations and our data center.

Dan Farber: How do you utilize the Internet and websites as a way for the athletes as well as administrators to access all that information?

Andre Mendes: We have the results being posted on the Internet on a constant basis, so the athletes and their families can go in and look at how they performed in this particular competition. We also have an effort that was started in Shanghi that I think is a fabulous concept. We have attempted to capture every single athlete that participated in our events and then create snippets that can be downloaded and searched. So that regardless of where the competition is taking place, the parents and the neighbors and friends of our athletes throughout the world can go into an Internet cafe, for example, and go into a particular website called LiveSpecialOlympics.org and search for their athlete and actually see footage on a fairly quick basis of their athlete, friend, or family participating in the competition. That brings an amount of joy in participation that heretofore was really not possible.

Dan Farber: Now as a CIO, and despite the fact that you are a nonprofit, you obviously have to watch your costs and look at the latest technologies that can help you achieve your goals. I wanted to ask you about areas such as open source and cloud computing. Are those on your radar?

Andre Mendes: Actually, to a large degree open source is not, except on ancillary projects. One of the characteristics of a Chief Informational Officer in a nonprofit like Special Olympics is that I am also, to a certain degree, Chief Begging Officer or Chief Technology Begging Officer. Because one of the things that we do is we go out there and try to convince some of the leadership of the largest technology corporations that this is a worthwhile event and very much worthy of their sponsoring and funding. We went to companies like Microsoft and HP and Citrix and Avaya and Extreme Networks and we have managed to get tremendously graceful loans from them, and grants of equipment and software from them, that have allowed us to create what I consider a state-of-the-art type of environment from an IT perspective, utilizing very much the same technologies that you would find in a for-profit environment.

Dan Farber: I want to ask you about your role as CIO and I found a quotation from you recently where you say that, "You have to unlearn old operating systems, database packages and legacy apps, and you have to give up on old standards." So are you focused mostly on the new standards, on the Internet as a standard for operating?

Andre Mendes: Yes, that comes from a philosophical principle that I hold very dear. That basically says that evolution progresses faster when you are able to standardize and then create mutations that are beneficial to you on top of that standardization. For me, the basic operating principle is to completely standardize everything that we have. So we can build an abstraction layer on top of another abstraction layer, and therefore reduce our costs and reduce the focus that we have to keep on infrastructure types of issues. By virtue of doing that, what you are able to do is, you are able to focus all of your attention on the value-added parts of the equation that come at the higher levels of functioning. If the standards nowadays are to operate in a virtual environment with Web access to everybody and virtual storage, or in a data center, or in the next level with the cloud computing and cloud storage, then that is the way we are going to pursue it. Not only because it makes sense from an economic standpoint, but because it allows you to abstract your thought process and your energy on a daily basis from the day-to-day of running an organization's infrastructure. With that in mind, we can move on to the next level.

Dan Farber: Andre, thanks so much for speaking with me.

Andre Mendes: Absolutely, Dan. It's been my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Dan Farber: I have been speaking with Andre Mendes who is the CIO of the Special Olympics. For CIO Sessions, I'm Dan Farber. Thanks for watching.