Media centre

Thursday 5 Jan 2006

£10M IT PROJECT REFRESHES RAILWAY DESKTOP

Region & Route:

National

One of the UK’s largest technology upgrades this year has been completed by Network Rail.  17,500 IT users, in more than 460 UK locations, have been migrated to the latest versions of Microsoft Office applications under XP/SP2.  The programme was completed within eight months, with no down time to the business, on time and under budget. The new corporate infrastructure was extended and a fresh customer desktop was designed and ready for deployment within four months.  In addition, over 8,000 new PCs and laptops were assigned across the country.  490 applications were tested and distributed to users – cutting the number of applications on the Network Rail desktop by 50%. This paved the way for the roll-out of 8,500 TFT screens which will be completed by February 2006. Joe Van Valkenburgh, Director, Information Management said: "This was a challenging programme.  Others in the industry have failed to roll-out XP this year, but we found a way to do it, by having the right team and partners, with a clear objective, empowerment and proper support.   We are already seeing the benefits by way of a reduction in the demand on our support teams”. The successful company-wide XP implementation follows last years’ migration of 6,000 users, who joined Network Rail during the “in-source” of maintenance staff in 2004, onto a new XP based infrastructure The Information Management team selected a balance of a key logistic partner and known delivery specialists who would best supplement  the work of the internal programme team, which had the core IM skills that drove the successful delivery within the given time scales.  Network Rail selected the following suppliers to help deliver the programme: ·         Siemens Business Services (www.sbs.siemens.co.uk) who managed as a key partner, the logistics of factory building the new desktops and laptops and delivering them to site whilst taking care of disposals and asset control.  ·         Hewlett Packard (www.hp.com), which partnered Network Rail’s Information Management Partner (IMP), Atos Origin (www.atosorigin.com) , to design with the IM team the XP Professional and Office Build for the desktop ·        afiniti (www.afiniti.co.uk), who provided key specialist resources in the areas of communications and project management. Iain Coucher, Deputy Chief Executive, said: “Network Rail cannot be successful without becoming more IT literate, information knowledge dependant and IT enabled on a massive scale.  The success of our IM team and its partners in tackling large scale IT challenges helps our business move forward more smoothly and efficiently. The XP roll-out was an exemplary project in this respect”.