Simon Pitt thinks he has got the greatest job in IT. “What could be better than working for an organisation whose mission is ‘to create a better place’. It’s just the best objective ever,” he said.

Pitt became the new head of corporate information services at the Environment Agency in May, taking charge of a department comprising about 500 staff and with a budget of tens of millions. The Environment Agency is the largest organisation of its kind in Europe. It employs 12,000 people, most of whom work in its headquarters in Bristol, with the remainder spread across dozens of regional and area offices. Set up in 1995, it has an annual budget of £900m that it spends on a wide range of schemes that together aim to protect and improve the environment of England and Wales.

The agency’s work includes flood prevention programmes, anti-pollution initiatives, wildlife conservation projects and carbon trading schemes. Given all the good work the organisation does, it is easy to understand Pitt’s enthusiasm.

“Everything I’ve ever done has worked up to this. I’ve always had this ethos to try to improve life for people,” he said.

Pitt had plenty of scope to satisfy this urge to make a difference at one of his earlier postings. As director of information management at London Underground between 2002 and 2005, he was in charge of an IT overhaul that aimed to make the company a far more customer-centric organisation.

“When I joined London Underground I was given about 18 months to transform what was a very back-office and fragmented IT function into something that was focused on delivering a service to the people who ran the railway and the customers who used it,” Pitt said.

One of his main aims was to turn data held in London Underground’s 500 asset databases into useful information. “The goals were to deliver real-time service information to customers and minute-by-minute management information to the people running the railways,” he said. “We used a mix of ETL [extract, transform and load] tools, data marts and web technology to extract key bits of data, turn it into useful information and deposit it where someone could view it.”

The first stage of the project involved hooking up all the stations to a network. Unbelievably, when Pitt joined LU in 2002 most stations still did not have a networked PC. “Information was communicated from line control to stations by telephone. It could take an hour for information about a disruption to be passed on from the controller to the last station in the chain, by which time the incident would probably be over,” he said.

To further improve access to information, Pitt implemented a wireless network and deployed mobile devices to front-line staff.

Underpinning all this was a change of culture in the IT function. “We turned the department into a team that really understood the railway and was absolutely committed to delivering a better service and being an integral part of the business,” he said.

Improving services through better access to information is also one of Pitt’s key tasks at his new job. As part of the Environment Agency’s ongoing More, Better, Faster programme for IT, he is looking to improve knowledge sharing throughout the organisation.

“We’ve got lots of databases around the place but it’s a case of being data rich but knowledge poor,” he said. “We’ve got to improve this very rapidly. I’m working with the various operations within the agency to work out their priorities in terms of information needs, and working with the data management and knowledge teams to drive this forward.”

Pitt said his efforts to improve knowledge management are a vital component of the agency’s response to Sir Michael Pitt’s final report into the 2007 summer floods.

Published at the end of June, the Pitt Review is the culmination of a year-long inquiry that examined the emergency response to last summer’s flooding and investigated how the country can reduce the risk and impact of floods in the future.

In his formal response to the report, Environment Agency chief executive Paul Leinster stressed the urgent need for the country to learn lessons from the events of last year. “Last summer’s floods highlighted the urgency of adapting to the potential effects of climate change to protect lives, property, the economy and the environment. It’s clear that we are going to face less predictable weather and more extreme events such as flash flooding,” he said.

One of the Pitt Review’s main recommendations is that the Environment Agency should assume a strategic overview role for all types of flood risk in England. This new remit, which is enshrined in the government’s proposed Floods and Water Bill, is driving a range of data-sharing, forecasting and modelling initiatives at the agency. For example, this month the Environment Agency and the Met Office began piloting a new service to forecast and warn emergency services and critical infrastructure providers about extreme rainfall that could lead to surface water flooding.

The agency is also looking to integrate data from 110 of the Met Office’s real-time rain gauges into new, more detailed river forecasting models, which should lead to more timely flood warnings being issued and better decisions by flood forecasters.

The ability of the agency’s IT team to deliver these and other important innovations, such as new carbon trading and asset management systems, is closely tied up with what Pitt described as his number-one priority: the successful completion of “the most sustainable green government IT contract ever”.

Announced last December, the £750m 10-year contract will see a leading services provider take over responsibility for the Environment Agency’s day-to-day IT needs.

Pitt said the deal, which is on schedule to be completed by the end of the year, will leave him at the head of a smaller but more responsive in-house team that will concentrate on “providing and managing the strategic, business-focused aspects of IT”.

But the extent to which the move improves the agency’s ability to meet its strategic goals will not be the only measure of its success. Indeed for Pitt, there is a far bigger prize up for grabs.

“The deal will have very clear objectives for sustainability and green IT,” he said. “We will make sure the provider we appoint is absolutely committed to rolling this type of contract out both down through its supply chain and into its other outsourcing contracts.”

Pitt said he wants nothing less than to permanently embed green principles into all outsourcing procurement agreements. “If we can get the contract right and cascade it throughout the government sector it would be a real coup. And if we can get our outsourcing partner to put in standard green terms that it will then use in its private-sector contracts, then the benefit from that would be absolutely huge,” he added.

Pitt said the Environment Agency will work with the Cabinet Office’s Green IT Working Group to try to roll out the contract model throughout Whitehall and beyond. This task will join other initiatives through which the two bodies are seeking to promote greener business practices.

“We are working with the Green IT Working Group to develop top tips for reducing carbon emissions and balance score cards so people can measure their progress,” Pitt said. “We are also doing similar things with the BCS, Carbon Trust and Intellect.”

Not surprisingly, consideration for the environment is hard-wired into the agency’s working practices. “Sustainability and environmental impacts are factored into every business contract that we write,” Pitt said. “Also, we measure our mileage and ensure staff optimise their work patterns. On top of that, we use virtualisation and power-management software to try to reduce the impact of our systems.”

For Pitt, green business is simply good business. “Most of these things improve efficiency and effectiveness, and reduce cost. Any hard-nosed business should be looking to do this,” he said. “The key is to take simple steps, save some money and then reinvest those savings into more sophisticated solutions. If you can get that virtuous circle going you can constantly and consistently drive your green credentials up, while also saving money, and improving the condition of your IT and the services you are providing.”