From tracks man to tax man

Pavitt: There is evidence that culturally, people like IT more than they realise

Phil Pavitt is chief information officer (CIO) at Transport for London (TfL), the organisation that runs the Tube and buses in the capital. However, in September he will take up the position of CIO for one of the largest public sector IT users, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), where he will oversee 1,400 staff and a budget of £1bn.

Computing caught up with Pavitt to hear how he will set about building an IT function that can meet the needs of one of the most demanding government organisations.

How do you explain your vision of aligning IT to business requirements?
I tend to feel my way through an organisation and get an idea of its history. In the first few months after I join, I spend my time understanding the key elements rather than creating numerous strategies. I have to get to the crux of what an organisation thinks about. When I started at TfL and the services were broken, I could have talked about strategies such as service-oriented architecture, but all the average user cares about is the time it takes to log on.

What was your understanding of TfL after being there a few weeks?
Most people were resigned to an OK IT system and a problem had to be pretty big to complain about. I told the customers this system is not great and I told my team we had to be more customer-centric.

There were lots of problems that I don’t think will surprise anyone, particularly in a public sector organisation. There was very little central process, with everyone building their own instead. In fact, the good news was that we had one of every single application in the world. The bad news was, we didn’t know this and we could not work out what to do with them all.

The problem was, they all worked independently but very well. When you have 40 datacentres, 40 networks, 11,000 applications and 41 asset management systems, you realise that no one has figured out the horizontal bit. And like quite a few organisations, all the verticals were task-objective into their own vertical. This creates problems when you try to set the priority between saving a bus application from going down and an underground application going down.

We also had an interesting support model. We were not an intelligent buyer, in fact we outsourced most of our intelligence. We were heavily dominated by third-party players, particularly those from IT consultancies and those who had a vested interest. All these people were not sure of their long-term view of us as an organisation.

Now we are in the middle of a 24-month efficiency strategy that requires vision and confidence about where we are going. Before we started the strategy, we focused on the main priority, which was the average customer just wanting the IT to work and that’s it. Once you have earned the right to strategise, because it works, then go for it.

Do you have any ideas of what your strategy will be at HMRC?
It will certainly be a big change from TfL. Managing transport company
staff is demanding because the employees are so IT-literate and technically savvy, so they hold very high expectations. For example, one challenging demand I had to deal with was making sure that their BlackBerrys would work everywhere.

HMRC will also be different because it already has a centralised IT function.

What kind of precautions did you take when centralising IT at TfL?
I don’t like the term centralisation. We build true shared services. In the past, IT departments centralised, de-centralised or federalised. Shared services are different. They are run through a central function and delivered locally.

It’s like the iPhone. About 80 per cent of our applications are common and the last 20 per cent is up to individual departments to personalise.

When I started at TfL, I found quite a few unusual applications running on critical servers but that were not treated as critical. There tended to be only one version of each application and the person who designed it had left the business, but still staff did not want to see these applications taken away. I see it as evidence that culturally, people like IT more than they realise. It just means that as an IT manager, you need to work harder and harder so people come over to your side.

Now, 65 per cent of platforms across the organisation are common and in a public sector organisation, that is close to a miracle.

What are your views on cloud computing?
We have to finish our 24-month efficiency strategy before we consider such things as cloud computing. But when buying it, there are a number of things to think about first, such as how much cheaper is it really? And how will you manage downtime?

We are not a bleeding-edge organisation so we will not be the first to adopt new technology. We have to be a follower because we have crucial applications that support crucial transport systems such as London Underground.