Network Rail has completed a six-month, £30m IT roll-out
to provide systems to support track maintenance operations that it
inherited from Railtrack.
As part of the government's move to bring maintenance back
"in-house", Network Rail's information management team undertook to
provide a new corporate infrastructure.
IT services were established for 6,000 new IT users at more than
300 UK locations, and over 150 new applications were tested and
deployed, with training given to more than 5,000 employees.
Joe Van Valkenburgh, Network Rail's information management
director, said, "This was a challenging programme - some people
thought it could not be done. But we found a way to do it, by
having the right team in place with a clear objective, empowerment
and proper support.
"The successful completion of this programme is a great example of
how a team worked together with a common goal, and delivered a
difficult programme on time and under budget."
Van Valkenburgh said his team possessed the core skills that
allowed them to specify and manage the best-of-breed IT systems
chosen.
Suppliers used by Network Rail
- Hewlett-Packard and Atos Origin partnered to build a central IT
infrastructure based on Microsoft 2003 servers with Active
Directory, Exchange mail servers, and XP Professional and Office on
desktops.
- BT delivered connectivity to existing and new sites.
- Afiniti provided training, which included end-user,
communications and change management support.
- Computacenter managed hardware and software supply, engineering
services, cabling installation and configuration services.
- Siemens Business Services provided personnel to assist in the
management and roll out of the local area network and desktop
support.
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