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The directions from the company's press office staff are admirably concise and clear: "If you're coming in from Twickenham, you're best getting the Jubilee line from Waterloo to Canary Wharf. Leave the station via the main exit up the big bank of escalators and turn right. Go past Smollensky's and Carluccio's and up the steps towards the big tower. Turn left and follow the road into Cabot Square and down the road the other side. When you get to the big roundabout at the end, we're the building on the left."

Hard to go wrong with instructions like these, and in no more than 25 minutes of arriving in Waterloo and making a comfortable journey on a spotless train to perhaps the most eye-catching station on the London Underground network, I am decanted at an impressive suite of modern offices. So, despite what many capital commuters might assume, Tube Lines, the six-year-old outfit that maintains and operates the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines - and the company I am visiting on this icy cold morning - must be doing something right.

Of course, head of media relations Laura Cox has heard them all before but my journey is a reminder that the London Underground is a bit like Dr Johnson's observations on a dancing dog: it might not always do it wonderfully well, but it is a miracle it can do it at all. And at the very least, travelling on the Underground is - generally speaking and especially at rush hour - infinitely preferable to the horrors of South West Trains.

Tube Lines, like any entity involved in the Sisyphean task of shunting 400,000 people around a network every day, parts of which that goes back to the middle of century before last, is always going to be a target for critics. But for John Connolly, who for the last 16 months has served as Tube Lines director of information, things are on an upswing. He is the first person in his position at Tube Lines to sit on the executive committee and with a head of information management, Liz Scott-Wilson, having recently been appointed, and a head of IT, Adrian Davey, already in situ, he feels he has the team to address both opportunities and problems.

"Before, you either worked for the FD or the chief executive and IT reported to the FD," Connolly says. "That's OK if you're trying to run IT as a back-office transactional service but if the dilemma is how you manage information, it's not such a good place."

That level of executive intimacy and freedom to focus gives Connolly the opportunity to drive the information agenda at Tube Lines, a key aspect of which is organising the reams of content implicit in upgrading track, stations, signals, and trains and maintaining infrastructure.

"What we were completely missing [previously] was a capability in information management," he says, adding that the intent now is to "create an information management culture". The key is to make it easier for construction and maintenance to work together in harmony - quite a novelty in a world where the two are normally kept well apart.
"My background is in construction and it's normally two organisations: design and build is completely [separate from] operate and maintain," he says, adding that there has been "less focus on quality information and [too many] Iron Mountain [secure records] boxes" bringing chunks of data without necessarily containing sufficient context to render this information useful.

The industry has "been plagued almost forever" by the schism that has led to poor knowledge transfer and, hence, in-efficient processes, Connolly contends.