National Highways

Introduction

National Highways plan, design, build, operate and maintain England's motorways and major A roads, collectively known as the strategic road network (SRN). Between 2020 and 2025, National Highways will be investing £27.4 billion in the SRN in order 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 in order to improve safety, reduce network disruption, increase standardisation and enable adoption of emerging technologies.

National Highways

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, data quality, accessibility and visibility. In order for it to deliver its objective of harnessing data and technology to improve the Strategic Road Network (SRN), including its vision for Digital Roads, it sought to significantly improve the governance and management of its critical data assets.

Digital Roads

What We Did

We helped to develop a common data model (CDM) for National Highways. A CDM combines a uniform set of metadata, standardised extensible data schema, relevant data standards, and naming conventions. Together, they provide a common data language that is used by users and systems alike to govern all data-related processes including data transformation, data exchange and data access operations.

Common Data Model

Key Outcomes

Our innovative approach helped National Highways to solve longstanding issues relating to data quality, accuracy, inconsistency, fragmentation, incompleteness and duplication. By using the CDM to govern all access to, and operations on, critical data assets, both National Highways and their suppliers now have access to consistent, accurate, trustworthy and complete data sources with which to inform evidence-based decision making to improve England's strategic road network.