Introduction
National Highways plan, design, build, operate and maintain England's motorways and major A roads, collectively known as the strategic road network (SRN). National Highways are investing £27.4 billion in the SRN to achieve their objective of providing safer, smoother and more reliable journeys for the public. A key part of their Strategic Business Plan (SBP) governing this investment is to utilise data more effectively to improve safety, reduce network disruption, increase standardisation and enable adoption of emerging technologies.
The Challenge
National Highways operates within a complex multi-stakeholder ecosystem which, prior to 2020, was characterised by disparate data assets with poor data governance, significant data quality issues and poor data accessibility. To deliver its objective of harnessing data and technology to improve the Strategic Road Network, including delivering its vision for Digital Roads, it sought to significantly improve the governance, management and quality of its critical data assets.
What We Did
We supported the development of a Common Data Model (CDM) at National Highways. A CDM combines a uniform set of metadata, standardised extensible data schema, relevant data standards, and naming conventions. Together, it provides a common data language that is shared across both users and systems to govern all data-related processes, facilitating seamless data exchange between different services and organisations.
Key Outcomes
Our support helped National Highways to solve longstanding issues relating to data quality, accuracy, inconsistency, fragmentation and incompleteness. By using the CDM to govern its critical data assets, both National Highways and their suppliers now have access to standardised, accurate, trustworthy and complete data with which to inform evidence-based decision making to improve England's strategic road network.