Keeping the
London Underground
running is no easy task. The network of tunnels is up to 150 years
old, every piece of equipment needs constant attention, and most of
the work must be done within four hours in the dead of night.
The company looking after the Northern, Piccadilly and Jubilee
lines is relying more and more heavily on IT and information to
help them manage maintenance of the tube, and to make sure things
run smoothly.
Tube Lines has a 30-year contract with Transport for London to
maintain the three lines. It has thousands of assets, including
escalators, track and signals - all of which need to be working
perfectly.
When it comes to maintaining these assets, Tube Lines' director
of information John Connolly faces a similar challenge to large
swathes of the public sector. Information and data is crucially
important, but staff don't always see it that way. The result is
that the workplace culture surrounding information needs an
overhaul.
But while the MoD and the Home Office
struggle to impart to their staff the wisdom of not taking
databases to the pub, Connolly has a different message for his
team.
His aim is to collect valuable, detailed data on assets -when
they break, how they break, and why. By looking at the most common
cause of failure, or at how often something breaks, Tube Lines can
tailor a maintenance programme around the behaviour of the
equipment.
"The information is in many ways as important as the asset
itself, because it tells us what to do with the asset. This is
hugely important," he says.
"In order to get reliable management of information, you have
got to start at where that information actually comes from," says
Connolly. "In our case, information comes from a dirty tunnel at
3am where someone's got a spanner in one hand and - hopefully - a
pencil in the other."
He wants employees to adopt a similar approach to information as
that of airlines or the manufacturing industry. Airlines must
maintain their aircraftto high standards of safety, getting
everything right first time. Tube Lines has a similar challenge -
to make sure its services are safe, with the right maintenance job
done at the right time. The collection of information needs to be
uniform and disciplined, or the maintenance regimes built on it
will fail.
"In many ways I am trying to drive a big culture change," said
Connolly. "One of the reasons we are so good at safety is everybody
is really clear that it is non-negotiable. We would never dream of
compromising safety. Now I'm asking the organisation to take a
similar stance on the quality of information."
Connolly will not upgrade Tube Lines' IT systems until he thinks
the company is using the IT it already has effectively. He wants to
get the basics right, he says, before adding new features.
The other important aspect surrounding IT culture change is
engaging with executives. Connolly has focused on bridging the
communication gap that often exists between IT and the rest of the
business, in an attempt to bring expectations of what IT can
achieve to a realistic level. Each quarter, he
meets to discuss information and IT with the rest of the board,
talking about everything from the progress of specific projects to
information strategy.
"It means the team looks at something in a structured way rather
than IT being the stuff you jam in between audit reports and any
other business. It's very focussed.
"It's better than the head of IT consistently being on the end
of a series of requests, and it's a better way to get realistic
expectations."