Challenging Beliefs
"I think that statement is outrageous," Pavitt says with a shake of the head. It was enough to motivate him to join "to give lie to that statement". When he arrived he was pleased to discover that overall the IT was good, although not as joined up as he prefers. "Culturally, what we had was a team with low morale. Here I have found some of the cleverest people in technology, " he says. One year on, morale is high and people are jumping off well-known commercial ships to be a part of the TfL transformation. "People who are coming here are leaving companies like BP and Fujitsu. I ask them why they want to come. It is the idea of being involved in something very live that they will be using and will be used for 2012."
The passion for the product can be seen in Pavitt and no doubt transpires into the team. "I am affecting the journeys of real customers. What makes the job amazing is the variety. In a day I will be discussing the iBus announcement systems, talking to a Tube maintenance worker about tagging himself to a line overnight using RFID for safety. You are flipping between major pieces of work all day." The job is, of course, not without its challenges, the most significant, according to Pavitt is that the Tube is a Victorian solution for a 21st century world.
Into The Future
"What I like about the civil service is that you are taking the long view. You are building for 10 years' time, so architectural and platform, and I don't mean railway platform, decisions are very important." Not content with re-energizing IT at TfL, Pavitt has become involved in the Greater London Authority (GLA) CIO Group and has once again spearheaded a change in mind set. "We are starting to buy and think together," he says. Although TfL had some good IT on his arrival, Pavitt is critical of governmental IT. "Government has gone through fashions of IT faster than anyone," he says, and he sees little point in ideas like Project Flex for shared services.
Pavitt's role at TfL is not just about refocusing an IT team and joining up disparate systems; Pavitt and TfL share a bold vision of how travel in a historic, busy and commercially vital city can be improved through information. Real- time information delivery about travel schedules, delays, routes and alternatives is the ultimate ambition for Pavitt's team. "You can do it today in single silos, but in 2012, millions of people will descend on this city and they are going to need information," he says. This vision was already in place when Pavitt joined, but his recruitment was very much about the execution of the idea. He admits it is "getting towards the mega-city concept", but doesn't apologize. Instead, he has a dream of the information-based services and transactions he could offer Londoners. His vision encompasses analyzing Oyster data, correlated with the Tube map, knowing what stations a customer joins and alights the 144-year-old network and asking passengers to input their body weight. For example, TfL could offer travellers an ideal fitness regime based purely on getting off the Tube one or two stops earlier. It could all be available on a BlackBerry or mobile phone in time for the Olympics.
To some, the semantic web and data monitoring is too close to Patrick McGoohan's super-state community depicted in the TV show The Prisoner, but Pavitt is sanguine and believes London is the place to develop such groundbreaking information services. "London attracts all sorts of people and they want to experiment here," he says confidently. Statistics back up his belief, with London being a global hub for adoption of mobile services and social networks which rely on sharing personal data and allowing others to manipulate it for a service.
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