Back on track

Europe’s railways need to up their game in IT.

High-speed rail networks have grown, and airline users are mixing flights with rail more and more.  For today’s commercially complex, cross-border and intermodal rail, rail companies should adopt a more progressive approach to IT. That way they can focus on delivering a great rail service, not on the fundamentals of IT.

Certainly rail firms need to raise their game in IT if high speed and established rail are to become the method customers prefer for travelling. Done right, tomorrow’s IT will raise productivity, cut costs, and give the whole customer experience of rail a new sense of romance and ease. Done wrong, tomorrow’s rail IT could have very negative consequences. As routes and rail companies multiply, passengers may feel overwhelmed by too many options, especially on multicountry rail trips. For rail to be coherent rather than chaotic, rail firms need carefully to reconsider their practices in IT.

Every rail company now needs to be able to compete creatively with every other rail company – and with airlines, too. At the PC, at the station and especially with mobile, the applications each rail firm offers and the interfaces each makes available promise to be key differentiators in the marketplace. So rail firms need to extract themselves from infrastructure IT, and focus on their main business: punctuality, ride quality, safety, and building their brands – in part, through the deployment of IT at the front-end.

Over the past 15 years, sharing an outsourced community IT platform has allowed many rival airlines to make this move. Obviously, rail IT is very different from airline IT. Nevertheless, the record in airlines strongly suggests that rail needs to look at, understand, anticipate and align its business strategies to customer habits.

This White Paper shows how rail companies can throw off the burdens of old IT and focus on those areas, and on those unique railway competencies, that will make rail the preeminent means of travel in decades to come.

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Written in conjunction with amadeus, this White Paper can be downloaded by clicking on this Back on track, supporting the development of a 21st century rail network link.