Phil Pavitt, CIO, Transport for London

After a rollercoaster ride at telco NTL Phil Pavitt was contemplating a more relaxing semi-retirement that involved spending more time at his house in France, flying helicopters and playing golf.

At least, even for a self-confessed work junkie like Pavitt, that was the plan until the headhunters came knocking about the CIO role at Transport for London (TfL).

Speaking to silicon.com at his TfL office, Pavitt - recently voted one of the UK's top CIOs - says: "I was in a slight dilemma whether to completely retire or to do [the] typical CIO [thing] and become an allegedly qualified consultant and probably add even less value than the average consultant."

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The other initial sticking point was his track record of taking on "big stuff" - massive change programmes, big decisions, all done quickly. Culturally, a giant public sector monolith like TfL was a very different beast to anything he'd taken on before in terms of the pace things move at.

In the end Pavitt was lured by the challenge to prove - against contrary advice from confidants he'd sounded out - that it is possible to deliver big change quickly in the government sector.

He says: "In the end I decided to take the role philosophically because that cannot be right. I think that is a lie put around to excuse lazy and poor IT management in many government agencies - and that's a personal opinion."

One of Pavitt's key targets is to streamline and modernise TfL's vast IT infrastructure across the various business units - London Underground, Buses, taxi franchises and rail franchises.

He explains: "All the transport modes or business units have pretty much done their own thing around IT. Not in an uncontrolled way but they've built their own infrastructure, perhaps sometimes their own network, their own data centre storage, their own space, their own hosting. All the stuff you'd expect."

Across the various IT teams and whopping £1bn annual tech budget at TfL there are about 500 direct employees (nearer 1,400 when you add in the outsourced pieces), supporting 14,000 desktop PCs, 14,000 handheld devices, 30-plus data centres and more than 1,000 applications including one of the biggest government SAP implementations.

The aim is to build more common platforms across the business units, share applications and systems.

"If you start trying to put some of this stuff together you don't need 10 versions of SAP, you don't need 11 versions of Oracle. So it's just a standard we have a lot of it because we haven't done it in a co-ordinated fashion, although it works absolutely fine," he says.

The first step in this plan is what Pavitt calls the "infrastructure 101" - making sure all the fundamentals at the network and core infrastructure level are there, removing single points of failure, removing design flaws and double and triple checking resilience. That work is being done with CSC and Fujitsu Services.

The next step is to modernise and overhaul TfL's tech by taking a massive generational leap - a move that will help the organisation provide more real-time information to both customers and front-line customer-facing staff.

Pavitt presented the plan last September to the TfL board to provide the most state-of-the-art, cutting edge technology in a single two-year programme covering desktop, applications, networks, data centres, hosting, data management, projects and service management. The key part of the plan was to fund this through the savings that will be made - in the hundreds of millions of pounds - on the 'infrastructure 101' programme.

Pavitt says: "It wasn't the hardest sell ever as you can probably imagine - a self-funded project to transform your IT and to give long term significant savings, reducing our running costs from seven to eight per cent down to two-to-three per cent of turnover (operating costs). Broadly that was agreed and we are now in the middle of executing that."

That state-of-the art tech vision is evident at the recent move of around 2,500 staff from TfL's surface transport business unit into one single building near London Bridge station with thin client (reducing login times to subsecond), wireless tech, multi-function devices for printing and faxes (bringing down the ration of one printer for three people to one device for 20).

There is also a strong green IT element to the move with a quarter of the number of servers and fewer data centres supporting that business unit now.

Pavitt says: "What I'm trying to do is make IT boring. I'm trying to make it so smooth running no-one talks about it. IT in most companies and in most government agencies is far too on the board agenda on the critical path of thinking. My job is to try and move it off so when I switch it on it just does what it says it will do. So we're really bringing ourselves into the very modern age. And most of what we are doing we are writing and developing and designing ourselves, not with our partners."

That last comment is a reference to the restructuring of TfL's outsourcing deals, which will see some work brought back in-house.

Currently TfL outsources its desktop management to CSC and network management to Fujitsu, with other suppliers, such as BT, doing smaller pieces. Those contracts were signed eight years ago and are up for renewal over the next 18-24 months.

Pavitt says in the past TfL has outsourced some of the strategic intelligence that should have been kept "this side of the fence".

"We may have given away one or two things we should have kept perhaps for ourselves," he says.

The outsourcing review is due to be completed by September and Pavitt expects some contracts to be simply extended, some to be repackaged and some to be brought back in-house.

He says: "All I can say to you now is we have 17 prime outsourcers, we won't have 17 by the time I've finished. What we will have I'm not sure but it will be a blend of in and out."

There are a number of technology pilots also already underway at TfL that could have a big impact on the passenger experience in future.

One of the most high profile is the so-called 'Oyster phone' near-field communications (NFC) technology being trialled in conjunction with AEG, Barclaycard, TranSys - the consortium that runs the Oyster card - and Visa Europe.

The Nokia 6131 NFC clamshell handsets are being used by 500 TfL guinea pigs, one of them being Pavitt himself. The idea is that the phone becomes an Oyster Card and a contactless credit card that can be used to pay for travel, goods and services - in addition to the usual phone functionality.

Pavitt is keen to stress this technology is still in the very early stages of testing and nowhere near ready for volume production, saying a lot has been learnt from the trials already.

He says: "There are so many questions to answer, around security primarily, not just one layer but real big security here. The handset manufacturers have got to help us with that sort of conversation. This really is at pilot stage. We're not piloting the final strategy we're piloting the concept while we're building the strategy."

The findings of the NFC Oyster phone trial are due to be presented by TfL early next year to various interested parties.

TfL is also still planning to do a controversial pilot of mobile phone connectivity underground on tube trains this year, although no date or technology partner has yet been chosen for this.

Another innovative technology being tested by TfL is a sat-nav type device that downloads real-time data on the speed limit for drivers. This is being piloted at the moment as an advisory service notifying drivers of the current speed limit - because of various legal rules and complications around using it as an enforcement tool.

The pilot will start with TfL drivers. Pavitt says: "We're going to experiment with this during this year. We've got technical spec and we've mapped the whole of London in terms of speed and so on."

Later this year the same sat-nav based tech will be used to help prevent freight drivers crashing into low bridges around London.

Pavitt's rise to the top started as a debt collector at BT in the telco's billing division. He rose quickly through the ranks there where he made a big play about the importance of IT in billing, before moving on to a succession of organisations including Cadbury and NTL.

Over the next couple of years Pavitt has a huge task at TfL, but what then? Another big CIO role?

He says: "I am a bit of a work junkie so I wonder what I would do if I properly retired. Is there another big CIO role in me? I'm not so sure. If I can deliver what I said I would here and prove there is another way of viewing government IT and the success of government IT there may well be a role about trying to drive a customer centric approach across a lot of government type agencies that face customers."