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96. Network Rail

• Head of IT: Susan Cooklin, CIO
• Industry: Transport and distribution
• Website: www.networkrail.co.uk

Network Rail is a statutory corporation which doesn’t create a dividend. Its main business is Network Rail Infrastructure Ltd which owns and operates the bulk of rail infrastructure in Great Britain, but not Northern Ireland. The primary customers of Network Rail are the train operating companies such as Virgin Trains, South West Trains and First Great Western.

IT Leader: Susan Cooklin, CIO

Reporting line:  Reports to CFO Patrick Butcher

Board level seat: No, there  is a small board of only six directors

IT budget:  £160 million

IT estate and or number of log on accounts under the control of the IT leader: 35,000 people in the organisation, 26,000 log in accounts

Level of the workforce that relies on technology to carry out their tasks: 100 per cent

IT staff currently employed: 740

Split between in-house/outsourced staff:   About 130 contractors with various outsourced staff

IT management team and reporting structure:  Eight people, three heads of delivery, head of infrastructure services, head of support services, head of IS strategy, Head of business operations, someone employed recently to run a transformation program 

Primary technology platforms at the organisation: ERP, email is on Outlook, Eclipse for maintenance management is used by 2000-3000 staff. We have approximately 1,700 applications

Primary technology suppliers:  ATOS Origin for mainframe, CSC for enterprise mid-tier level, Oracle for ERP, Microsoft, SCC for breakpoint fixes

Significant strategic technology deals been struck in the last 12 months: Extensions to existing contracts

Strategic aim of the CIO and IT operations for the next financial year: Priorities are to support the devolution of the rate based structure, enable industry cost reductions, deliver key structure strategic projects, reduce cost of the central operations

Technologies considered by the leader to offer their organisation potential: Stepped into virtualisation but don’t think it will derive much benefit for the company, same opinion on cloud

Future transformation and technology vision for the organisation:  The keys things are maintaining mobile technology for staff to be able to deploy apps and increasing analytical type technology and business analytics for extracting information

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