Enterprise mobility brings Network Rail agility 'never before conceived to be possible'

Joe Blake tells Computing's Enterprise Mobility Summit how mobile has brought massive changes to Network Rail

Network Rail has transformed the way it operates by rolling out an agile, mobile-focused strategy that has allowed the organisation to do things it would not have previously thought possible.

Joe Blake, sales director of enterprise mobile application platform FeedHenry by Red Hat, told Computing's Enterprise Mobility and Application Management Summit 2015 that this transformation has enabled an organisation which had a very traditional IT department to become faster and more agile, bringing benefits to users throughout Network Rail.

The firm has now gone so far as to roll out the use of Internet of Things-connected devices across its systems, but that innovative attitude was not always prevalent in the organisation.

"Not surprisingly, it is a very traditional, very conservative organisation which is tasked with the massive responsibility of keeping this country running," Blake said of Network Rail. "It keeps the wheels turning by ensuring very, very high levels of performance throughout that infrastructure and has done that over many years."

With a traditionally conservative approach to IT management, Network Rail initially struggled with mobile, but Blake described how the organisation slowly but surely realised the benefits and saw how it would require a different way of thinking.

"Over time they started to realise that mobile is different and it doesn't make sense to build their mobile strategy with the mindset of slow, long development cycles with propriety waterfall methodologies," said Blake.

"It changes on a monthly basis, as we know from the various new releases that are coming at us," he said. "It just doesn't make sense to tie yourself to a 12-month development cycle."

It therefore made sense for Network Rail to focus its efforts on mobile and harness areas such as agility, openness and non-proprietary technology, especially when there are so many experts with technology and software available to use.

"There are hundreds of thousands of people out there innovating all the time to solve technical problems with mobile and if you're smart, you want to make sure your business can leverage all the innovation that's going out there in the world solving things that are very real problems," said Blake.

Encouraged by the large selection of technology available, Network Rail set out to find more agile and more flexible ways of working with enterprise mobility, harnessing technologies such as cloud software. No longer burdened with legacy IT infrastructure, it is now embracing new technologies that are only two or three years old.

"They're leveraging technologies that enable business users - not even developers - to build apps quickly and flexibly and roll them out to the business," Blake explained, describing the "very significant" requirements of Network Rail, which now has more than 40,000 mobile staff who all need support using "200 to 300 mobile solutions across devices."

"That's a very complex problem and they took a very strategic approach to it," he said.

One way in which Network Rail got around that issue is by providing clients with a far more agile development toolset to "meet the huge demand from the business, but to do that flexibly, quickly and in a way that could be iterated over time.

"The first release is by no means the definitive article; you're going to get lots of new releases, new features out there as appropriate," said Blake.

The new, mobile way of working has also enabled Network Rail to allow business users to respond much more quickly to problems, such as severe weather affecting train routes and timetables.

"During last year when there was major disruption caused by storms and flooding, they needed to conceive, build and release a mobile application within hours," Blake told the Computing Summit audience.

"Network Rail was able to build and roll out an application that enabled its end users to receive real-time information about the location of the most severe problems, to collect mission-critical data associated with high-priority issues," he said, adding "They can rollout that solution in a couple of hours, no code required."

Ultimately, the deployment of a fully fledged enterprise mobility strategy has "massively improved Network Rail's ability to deal with crisis, focus their resources where they are needed most, and to keep and maintain the highest level of service possible," said Blake.

"It was a significant win for them and something they had never before conceived to be possible," he concluded.

Network Rail did not contribute to the content of this article.