Heavy Traffic

"When I got this job, my colleagues said I must be crazy," Tizi says today, speaking to CIO in Transurban's plush offices on the 43rd floor of Melbourne's Rialto Tower. At the time, CityLink was a favourite target of the local press, who never missed an opportunity to report on any setbacks the toll road project encountered. Although Tizi found it difficult to adjust to working in the glare of the media spotlight, the opportunity to help Transurban out of its predicament was simply too challenging for him to resist. Besides, criticism was inevitable, he says - especially in a city like Melbourne, where motorists hadn't been asked to pay road tolls for 15 years.

"Toll roads are not liked, as we all know," Tizi says. "They're just something we have to live with. There's a cost to the community but they get it back in more efficient transport, more efficient freight movement, and reduction in traffic jams in the surrounding surface roads."

The specific benefit afforded by CityLink's approach to tolling is that it operates on the "multi lane free-flow" principle: no toll gates, no barriers, and no channelling of cars into a particular lane. Cars can move from lane to lane at will, and the signal from the e-Tag transponder is picked up by a series of overhead gantries and the appropriate toll deducted automatically.

In the split second when a vehicle goes under the gantry it is tracked, photographed and then classified to see if it's a car, motorbike or truck. If the vehicle doesn't have an e-Tag, the system takes a photograph of the front number plate and scans it using optical character recognition (OCR) software to verify that the owner has purchased a day pass, CityLink's product for casual visitors to Melbourne.

"When you have high traffic numbers and traffic moving at 100kph, there aren't many systems around that have to manage so much data in real time. It puts tremendous pressures on the IT systems," Tizi says.

Max Headroom

As soon as he hit the ground at Transurban, Tizi could tell that CityLink's systems were operating under stress. In fact, they were operating under so much stress that one of his first decisions as CIO was to add more grunt to the IT infrastructure supporting the toll road. At that time, whenever Transurban had to shut down the system to conduct maintenance - a common occurrence during those early days, when teething problems were rife - the company would fall behind in transaction processing. "Catching up was a nightmare," Tizi says, so he immediately increased the system's capacity by adding more memory, disk space, and processing power.

"That was done to buy us time," Tizi explains. "It was obvious the system lacked headroom, so we gave ourselves 20-30 per cent more capacity, which gave us some breathing space. This allowed us to run some diagnostics and have a close look at the design, so we could figure out why it was unstable and why we had so little headroom compared to what we'd been expecting. After all, we were running some pretty heavy iron."

Tizi next hired a team of software engineers, whose job was to examine CSC's original design to see where the bottlenecks were. A sound plan, but a more troublesome problem loomed: Tizi hadn't counted on the fact that Transurban didn't own the technology its business was based on. Prior to Tizi's arrival, Transurban maintained only a token IT staff of two people and instead outsourced almost all its IT operations to CSC, including the development of the tolling software. "Certain things were defined in the initial prospectus, and IT was not big," Tizi says. "In fact, there was a belief that the IT systems would be nothing more than a black box in the corner."

Despite the problems in the tolling system, Tizi harbours no ill will towards CSC. "CSC did a good job," he says. "It was brand new technology that had been developed specifically for Transurban and it was very complex. Even though it was a little bit rough and ready when it was delivered, it had a good architecture."

Tizi has no interest in dragging CSC's name through the mud. He says most of the problems with CSC's original design were nothing out of the ordinary, describing them as "classic first-generation stuff". What was unusual, he says, was the labyrinthine network of partnerships and the legal minefields he had to negotiate in order to get any improvements made to the system.

When Tizi arrived at Transurban, he was told all technological issues were to be thrown to the company's construction partner, Transfield Obayashi. "They would then feed those issues to the integration company," he says. "The integration company would then take the issues up with the liaison people, who would then feed them to CSC - usually CSC's legal department. CSC's legal department would then pass them to the project managers and the technical guys and, eventually, they'd start looking at the problem."

At first, Tizi tried to follow the rules. He went through all the proper channels and drafted formal letters for the benefit of the legal departments. But before long Tizi found himself setting up secret back-door meetings with the system's developers, "so I could at least meet them and have a chat", he says.

"When I joined, I had a look around and identified some of the biggest problems we had. I said: 'Let's fix this problem first. Can I talk to the guy who can fix it?' They said: 'No you can't, you have to talk to the construction company. And you have to put it in writing. We'll give you a response later.'

"I said: 'We're haemorrhaging over here, I don't want to put it in writing and get a response. I just want to talk to the guy who's dealing with that particular module of this application. I just want to have a discussion with him - I don't want to shout at him!' "

Tizi knew he had to collapse those layers if he was ever going to make any headway towards improving the efficiency of CityLink's transaction processing. "The message was getting corrupted in the channels," he says. Every time he made a request, the first thing Tizi heard from CSC was: "Is this a warranty issue?"

"We didn't care if it was a warranty issue," he says. "We just wanted it fixed."