Network Rail is embarking on a fresh round of
application consolidation as it seeks to rationalise the complex
infrastructure it inherited from predecessor Railtrack and
maintenance contracts it insourced last year.
New director of information management Catherine Doran is
identifying a set of projects that will enable Network Rail to
collapse large numbers of applications starting from next year.
The track maintenance company, which owns the UK's rail
infrastructure, needs to rationalise its 895-strong suite of
applications to cut costs and move its systems on to a service
oriented architecture.
Doran, who took over from previous director of information
management Joe van Valkenburgh in the summer, said, "The piece that
we have not done and that we are kicking off now is defining in
detail where we want to be in five years. We know where we are
headed in our various workstreams, but what we do not have is the
big picture for our infrastructure by 2011."
Network Rail IT's original targets for application consolidation
were thrown off track last year when the company's management
decided to insource maintenance contracts, obliging IT to absorb an
extra 350 applications. Doran has already laid plans to cut the
number of insourced applications to 140, though she has yet to put
a deadline on the project.
The new targets will help to define the information management
department's strategy for the next five years. Network Rail has one
of the largest IT functions in the UK, with an annual budget of
£100m and more than 21,000 users.
Doran said, "We have to be very careful that we do not cause any
disruption to the people on the ground as we consolidate
applications."
Network Rail is running final tests on two new datawarehouses
that will hold information on train movements and asset
management.
The first datawarehouse has to record 28,000 train movements a
day and it must be up-to-date for its 500 users by 7am each
morning. Network Rail expects it to store 2Tbytes of data by March
next year.
The second datawarehouse stores the information produced by the
company's Rail Defect Tracker application - the software used by a
fleet of yellow trains to record damage to tracks.
Both datawarehouses run on Oracle 9i databases, but they are
being upgraded to Oracle 10g.