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L'opérateur ferroviaire de fret Union Pacific dessert 23 états des Etats-Unis. Très connus des amateurs de Western, cette société disposait aussi d'un système d'information commençant à dater : son mainframe avait 40 ans. Le CIO explique comment il a pu refondre son SI.

Discussions about Union Pacific's eventual move off its mainframe started some seven or eight years ago. The project kicked off in earnest four years ago. Tennison says UP couldn't find what it was looking for from packaged software vendors, so his team decided to build their future system themselves. First up, Tennison's team had to create, the nearly decade-long technology roadmap. The vision was to deliver a distributed, automated network and applications platform that could scale with the company, and could also control UP's 8,400 locomotives traveling across 32,000 miles of track. The system would need to manage customer orders, schedule trains, track shipments and many other transactional processes. And it would also have to integrate with the company's SAP ERP system. Underpinning this new system, called NetControl, would be a service-oriented, event-driven architecture that relies chiefly on open-source technology. Several tenets guided Tennison and his team during initial prototyping. For instance, he says they looked to computer science and engineering graduates and the types of environments they were using-"the Linux, Java, Unix worlds," he says-and matched many of those C.S. trends to their development strategies. A nod to the past, however, influenced two other areas. Because monolithic mainframes had always offered forced standardization-in development and database tools, in middleware components, in security-Tennison and his team wanted to keep as much standardization and discipline as possible in NetControl. "Making sure everybody does stuff the same way to a large degree," he says, "drives productivity and ease of use, minimizes security risk, and maximizes your purchasing power." They were also thinking long-long-term again. "We wanted to make sure anything we put in place could have the potential for another 40 years of life, just as our original one had," Tennison says. "So we had to guarantee that we had almost unlimited scaling capacity, and moving to a network of horizontally designed servers gave us that." A successful prototype delivered several years ago confirmed IT's technological vision and architectural framework for Union Pacific's new system. "Now," Tennison recalls, "we had to go after business issues." The Big Sell To pull this transition off, Tennison knew he had to get UP-wide buy-in: from the chairman and board to all the key VPs, operations and supply chain managers, marketing and finance execs, and everybody else who would touch the system. Some business areas would be especially affected; others, not so much. But it would, for sure, touch everybody in some way. Tennison needed to make the "sale" of his career and convince others that this was less a "tactical" project and more a "strategic" one.

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