• silicon.com
• Management
• Public Sector

By Nick Heath, 26 June 2009 15:53

INTERVIEW

...You have a common infrastructure, which is the iPhone, and 50,000 applications that are running on it."

Pavitt said thin client technology gives an excellent oversight of the IT infrastructure, describing how it has pinpointed that money was being wasted on licensing for 382 staff for an application that was being used by just 21 people.

TfL has already reduced the number of applications that it uses down from 11,000 to 500 and this year the number of datacentres it uses will drop from more than 40 to just two.

Pavitt has also pursued a shared services agenda, placing 65 per cent of TfL's systems on a shared common technology platform.

"Our HR department wanted an internal workflow system and the department managing the licensing of taxis wanted the same thing. Now the two business relationship managers are jointly purchasing SAP systems together.

"I almost cried - that was my magic moment as a CIO," he said.

Pavitt said that new joined-up back end systems will in future allow more real-time information on TfL services to be sent to customers' mobiles.

"We want the customer to be able to look at their mobile and see where the latest tube train is to the second and be able to look at a GSM map," he said.

Pavitt added that if a pilot of a system allowing travellers in the London Borough of Newham to access real-time travel information as well as access local council service information from their mobile proves popular, similar schemes will be launched across the rest of London.

Any potential rollouts are likely to go ahead without Pavitt at the helm, however, with his move to HMRC not far off now.

"I think I have been partially successful," he said of his stint at TfL. "My job was to make IT work and deliver the basics right and build a future platform that could be built on a generic basis.

"There is still some way to go but I am going to hand over to a team that can see the way through."

"I see my job as being to make IT boring. What I mean by that is that IT just does its job without people even thinking about it."