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date 2 June 1997 source Railtrack plc type Press release
Commenting on his appointment as Project Director for Railtrack's company-wide Year 2000 programme Philip Collings said:
"My appointment, supported by a cross functional team of experienced and enthusiastic managers, is the step change needed to build on the work hitherto carried out by Railtrack's Information Systems (IS) Year 2000 Team and meet the corporate commitment to compliance given by Chairman Sir Robert Horton to the Rail Industry conference in March.
Our plans indicated that now is the time to increase resourcing to deliver them. The overall Year 2000 Programme has five major streams of activity: Information Systems; Operational Embedded Systems; Property and Premises; Supplier Compliance and Industry Liaison. Each is a significant activity in its own right and directing the whole will be a full time job and more until well into 2000. My focus now is on building the teams to take each stream forward.
Managing IS in Railtrack since January 1994 has been as exciting a challenge as one could wish for but not that I have my mind around the full scope of Year 2000 it certainly dwarfs anything else I have seen or done. What is clear is that what the media and many businesses seem to see as the main problem - the organisation's older or legacy systems - is the easy bit, given that these systems are known and under professional IS management. The major challenges are in the other four areas where the date exposures have to be found and evaluated before they can be fixed.
What is really encouraging is the commitment made to this programme by the Railtrack Board together with the evidence of the whole UK Rail Industry pulling together to crack the problem effectively."
