Railtrack signals revamp with major desktop reorganisation

Railtrack has given the green light for its largest desktop project to date as part of a wider business reorganisation project called C.Change.

The first phase of the multimillion-pound C.Change project is the consolidation of eight scattered head office operations into one London site.

The move, which will take place in September, will centralise the company's IT operations. It includes the roll-out of a new 'professional workplace' desktop project.

Roll-out to Railtrack's seven regional operations will follow. Some software must be replaced because it is not year 2000-compliant.

The 'professional workplace' project pulls together scores of disparate IT initiatives across the company. It supports office-bound, mobile and home workers and includes new email, intranet, internet, workflow and electronic document imaging technology.

The latter is important because the company has millions of paper archives going back to the days of Brunel.

It is likely that incumbent Novell NetWare and Windows software will be ditched in favour of NT with Microsoft's Exchange or Lotus Notes.

Railtrack will decide whether to go down the Exchange or Lotus route later this month, according to IT director Philip Collings.

Collings has been tracking user productivity and PC performance across Railtrack's 6,000-strong user base for several months in a bid to cut the cost of PC ownership.

'The greatest issue today for IT and business managers is the total cost of ownership. C.Change is about how we do business and a key outcome of this is the desktop,' he said.

'There will be many benefits. We will get signallers on a good email system. This helps them feel less isolated and cuts down on the vast quantities of paper floating around.'