Egypt National Railways: ICT Can Save Egyptian Lives

Abstract

Since 1992, the Egyptian National Railways (ENR) has been encountering tremendous losses in lives and revenues. The losses were due to the lack of a proper IT infrastructure, making the network unqualified to handle the millions who use its railways every day. The safety measures along ENR’s 6,700 kilometers of railways network have been managed by human operations, which makes railway transportation too risky. When he came into office as Minister of Transport in 2010, Alaa Fahmy put safety as the highest priority. The intention of this research case is to investigate and showcase how ICT centric short term strategic actions combined with ICT centric long term strategies and reforms can be adopted to solve the eminent problems of safety and efficiency in the Egyptian railway sector. A one year longitudinal participant observation methodology has been adopted in this research case data collection process where the study was conducted in an uncontrolled observational manner to minimize any interference or manipulation to the real-life setting. Investigation has revealed that by focusing on ICT centric strategic actions that enhance the sources of the competitive advantage of the transport sector in Egypt, in addition to implementing long term strategies that are expected to boost the competitive advantage of the transportation sector in Egypt; a tenth of a minute operation risk factor of 0.01%0.001% has been realized. This factor is in compliance with the IEC international standard for electrical, electronic and programmable electronic safety-related systems. Furthermore, safety measures, reflected by the very low reported number of causalities during the study period, was ultimately improved