Platforms for IT Change

The rail industry never stands still, and Virgin Rail’s IT chief Francis Jellings knows that goes for the IT infrastructure as much as the rolling stock

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Early Doors

Jellings's first job was at lock manufacturer Yale, which he joined from school in 1966. His first IT experience came as a data processing trainee in the data preparation rooms. Within Yale, he moved from lock manufacturing to its forklift truck subsidiary.

This background in manufacturing taught Jellings the place of IT in a corporation. "IT should be quiet and in the background," he says. Quiet, that is, in terms of not disrupting the working day of station staff and train crews, not in terms of communications. Jellings, an affable and relaxed professional, enjoys meeting the varied work force of Virgin and learning what he and his department can offer. "I've always talked to people. If I put a proposal in front of the board, they ask who is involved from the company. They [the workers] know the best, they are on the frontline."

When Jellings joined Virgin Trains he was not faced with a mountain of work to tunnel through. "It was nowhere near the state of Alstom, here it was a case of the software applications needed standardization," he says.

"I had a lot of knowledge about outsourcing," Jellings says of the skills and experience he brings to Virgin Trains. "A similar model was already in place here with Capgemini looking after the infrastructure and service delivery." On boarding Virgin Trains, Jellings set about rationalizing IT. "We had server rooms in Euston, Birmingham and Preston. We had hardware all over the place, yet our remote users didn't have the standards that they required."

One of the first moves he made was to outsource desktop support when he joined the company; the previous method had been to put a member of the IT staff on a train if there was a problem in Edinburgh. Jellings immediately saw the productivity wasted of having staff travel such long distances and for the Edinburgh staff to be without immediate support.

"The people out there were not getting the same level of support as headquarters," he says.

All Change

Working for a rail company comes with a variety of challenges. There are the obvious ones of staff not being located in a central location, but the essence of the business is to be on the move. Virgin has inherited technology and infrastructure from British Rail, the once nationalized company privatized in the late 1990s.

"Some of the rail industry systems are not up to the modern standards, you have many bespoke systems with interfaces between them," Jellings explains. To improve the performance of these legacy systems Jellings set out about changing the service model that his department provided.

"It's been a long job, we moved the business-critical servers to a single data-center in Rotherham, which is supported round the clock. We have rationalized PC software, down from 500 different versions to just 120."