How IT keeps HS2 project on the right track

HS2 Ltd CIO James Findlay on the technology that could one day turn the government's controversial high-speed rail vision into reality

High Speed 2 (HS2) is a multibillion-pound high-speed railway that has been proposed by the government for quicker journeys between London and Birmingham, and eventually Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester. The proposals, which are estimated to cost the taxpayer between £43bn and £80bn depending on which is to be believed, also includes further railway tracks linking Leeds to Newcastle and Manchester to Glasgow.

The project will be delivered by High Speed Two (HS2) Ltd, a company established by the government. It is currently developing the legislation that is going through parliament for permission to construct the railway from London to Birmingham as part of phase one, and will then do the same for the railway from Birmingham to Leeds and Manchester.

But what is there for the IT team, headed by CIO James Findlay, to do in the meantime?

“There’s a significant amount of work in order to deliver such a large infrastructure project. Going through the parliamentary process and getting those permissions to do the construction entails a large amount of design drawings and data information about the environment,” he tells Computing.

Essentially, Findlay explains, in its current stage, HS2 Ltd is a design company.

“We need significant infrastructure to support the designs and all the collaboration required,” he says.

HS2 has to collaborate with the Department of Transport, its stakeholders and the industry as it holds large contracts with various construction and design companies.

One of the tools it uses to ensure that it can collaborate is software from SME INOVEM called Kahootz.

The Kahootz software enables 300 of HS2’s users in various divisions to build online workspaces as part of early-stage consultations and collaboration with stakeholders and suppliers. HS2 expects this to rise to 3,000 users as teams working between project engineers, stakeholders and suppliers expands for the delivery phases once construction starts in 2017.

“Our supply chain is extensive and Kahootz is helping us provide our engineering teams and suppliers with as much flexibility as possible when engaging with them, while aligning all these activities with our cloud-based development strategy,” says Findlay.

“We did various trials and INOVEM did a very good job, particularly in terms of how we transfer information and collaborate with the supply chain who are supporting us with the design work. We needed to be efficient because we had pretty tight time scales in delivering this project. We found using software-as-a-service (SaaS) was cost effective and also allowed us to do what our users required: collaborating and sharing ideas,” he says.

Crucially for HS2, Kahootz is provided by an SME and was procured using the government’s G-Cloud framework.

“We need to ensure as a government agency that we are stimulating the UK economy,” Findlay claims.

This is what led the company to use G-Cloud and Findlay believes the model means that organisations such as HS2 are “spoilt for choice”. This, he says, is the biggest challenge of using the G-Cloud, which is otherwise “pretty straightforward”.

“I was the first user of the G-Cloud ever, and I have never had any challenges with it and neither have the organisations I have worked in,” says Findlay.

“I find it relatively straightforward and there have been some significant enhancements over the past six months or so with the Government Digital Service (GDS) doing some fantastic work around [improving] the user interface and search engine,” he adds.

Business information modelling

Another key focus for HS2 is business information modelling (BIM). Findlay claims he would like a single BIM-type tool that covers all HS2’s needs, but he says this doesn’t exist at the moment.

“We’ve looked at a number of standard industry systems and applications and we’ve connected those through APIs to provide the BIM architecture and systems that we require,” he explains.

This includes Kahootz’s collaboration platform, Axiam’s risk SaaS platform on Salesforce1, and Bentley’s engineering design CAD software. The company also uses Microsoft SharePoint for internal documents, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM delivered by SME Optevia.

Findlay claims an independent review suggested that HS2 had progressed in terms of maturity for BIM with a ‘Level 2’ rating.

“That’s down to the excellent work with the suppliers we have and the integration of their systems to provide that overall 5D overview that we need to eventually get to ‘Level 3’,” he says.

And while collaboration and design are important for the here and now, the company is also looking at other technologies for the future.

For example, the firm has already starting to migrate some of its Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data onto Amazon Web Services s3 and Glacier storage compartments. It is also exploring the use of data analytics tools.

“We want to start looking at quite large data sets and processing these; we’re considering things such as Hadoop, particularly when we start getting huge volumes of data in when we start doing some construction work next year and we’ll keep this data and analyse it,” Findlay explains.

The company will be looking at predictive analytics too.

“We’re looking at focusing around the target operating model of the railway in 2032 and also what the data requirements are going to be for that. Not just for the company (HS2), but also for staff of the operating company and the users as well,” he says.

Fibre-optic technology alongside the infrastructure is another tool being considered, and could boast a number of benefits, Findlay claims, particularly for security reasons.

“It could allow us to listen in to any issues in terms of infrastructure such as flat spots on the wheels and any other stresses,” he suggests.

HS2 has recently implemented VMware-owned mobile device management (MDM) platform AirWatch to enable its staff to access their emails and other systems. It seeks to migrate to Microsoft Office 365 in the near future as well.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle for HS2 is the amount of mobile coverage it gets in rural areas, which could be vital for the project’s progress. But the organisation is in discussions with various telecoms companies on how it can address that, and Findlay sees this as an opportunity rather than a hindrance.

“It could be interesting for us to provide infrastructure to support the expansion of telecoms infrastructure to more rural locations as part of the broader UK broadband strategy,” he says.

Expanding the team

With all these new types of technologies being explored – or in some cases even implemented – the HS2 IT team will inevitably need to expand. HS2 currently employs 22 IT staff and it has plans to expand the team to 50.

“This depends on how the delivery of our development work goes; we are predominantly moving to increase the number of data analysts and data scientist skill sets within HS2,” says Findlay.

“As we move through the parliamentary process, we are looking forward to some of the ground investigation work and on to the construction work,” he adds.

Findlay acknowledges that data scientists are “in hot demand” in the IT industry at present, but he is keen to recruit people with the right skills in-house rather than having to outsource. However, if HS2 needed to do any large development work, Findlay would look to the market to provide that.

According to Findlay, the single biggest change over the past 18 months at HS2 is the use of CSC Leading Edge Forum researcher Simon Wardley’s mapping approach.

“It means we identify the behaviour of various systems that we have against the maturity of them and that’s really helped us realise what we should be pushing out – the commodity-type services like cloud computing and SaaS, as well as unique things such as BIM and using agile techniques,” Findlay explains.

“This means we are approaching cloud adoption and data analytics in a far more focused way than looking at the market and saying ‘everyone’s doing cloud, that sounds like a good thing’ – it’s far more detailed in the approach of how we are going to do it,” he says.

@Sooraj_Shah