Kainos & DfT: Revolutionising Roadworks Management

About the Department for Transport 

The Department for Transport (DfT) works with agencies and partners to support the transport network that helps the UK's business, people and goods travelling around the country. That includes planning and investing in the transport infrastructure that keeps the UK on the move by road, air, and sea. 

The Challenge

There are around 2.5 million utility street and highway authority (HA) road works carried out each year in England by over 450 organisations, with an estimated economic impact of £4bn per year. These street and road works need planned and managed by HAs and utility companies to ensure safe, efficient, and timely completion of work and to minimise disruption to road users. 

Both utility companies and HAs must apply for permits to carry out works which will then be assessed and approved by HAs. Organisations provide information on when the works start and stop, traffic management and other activities related to the works. All whilst providing Open Data to external users such as map providers, sat nav companies, researchers, and universities to inform journey planning and better decision making. 

DfT's vision was to provide a solution that would bring about the biggest change to the IT systems used by street and roadworks for a generation, by achieving:

• One source of truth: A centralised system that aligns with current legislation and consolidates business rules and patterns for third party integration - replacing a legacy system known as the Electronic Transfer of Notifications (EToN). 
• Reduced costs: Reducing the estimated annual cost to highway authorities and utility companies of running the legacy system of £40m (including £7m of licencing costs).
• Flexibility and efficiency: A modern software system that enables frequent, low-cost changes and short implementation timescales. 
• Better data driven decisions: Providing Open Data to external users such as map providers, sat nav companies, researchers, and universities. Making it easy to extract data and key performance metrics to inform decisions and more efficiently and sustainably plan journeys.

The Solution

From the outset, Kainos used our pioneering Service Design expertise and processes to work with core stakeholders to fully understand the legislation, policies and guidelines underpinning the planning, management and communication of street and road works and the reasons for the legacy service diverging over time. In parallel, our technical and data architects supported DfT's architecture team to evaluate innovative cloud hosting options to minimise vendor lock-in, maximise scalability and facilitate future migration. 

Using our market-leading agile expertise and deep data and cloud credentials, the core service was built over a two-year period, providing users with a central view of works, and enabling them to plan, manage and collaborate effectively. Regular engagement with subject matter experts, organisations and users was essential to the success of the service and enabled Kainos to operate in true collaboration with the end users. 

Data is one of the most valuable assets of any organisation and is key to better problem solving, decision making and continuous improvement. It has been a core consideration throughout the project with Kainos implementing DfT's first Open Data solution that provides 1.2m notifications per day in real-time about current and upcoming works/activities. This has helped improve collaboration and reduce congestion, supporting the department's sustainability strategy. Throughout the development of the service, Kainos collaborated with DfT technical leadership to ensure alignment to digital principles and standards. Non-functional requirements were agreed early on and validated by automated non-functional testing, ensuring the service could perform reliably. A security control roadmap with 85 controls, based on NIST Cyber Security framework, was agreed with DfT security experts to validate that the solution met security standards. 

Results and Benefits

In July 2020, Street Manager was launched and the entire street and road works community in England were onboarded successfully despite COVID-19 constraints. In the first year of service, our key performance indicators and user feedback demonstrated a remarkably successful transition.

The new service, which has achieved its business benefits (£10m annual savings) and realised its ambition of minimising disruption, improving efficiency, and improving journeys for all users of the road network, offers:

• A modern, extensible service: that can accommodate change easily and frequently in response to policy changes, user feedback, infrastructure/platform maintenance etc. 
• Data-driven decision-making: Centralised data that is accurate, consistent, transparent, and accessible supporting DfT policy development and decision-making.
• Increased collaboration: between organisations as all works are now visible across regional boundaries and thereby reducing the number of times a road needs to be dug up.
• Reducing costs: for organisations who previously used commercial offerings and data aggregation services to plan and manage street works and road works. 
• Open Data: a real-time feed of live and planned works is available to interested parties- including those specialising in journey planning and satellite navigation - to help mitigate the effects of works on road congestion. 
• Compatibility: via the Street Manager API to simplify integration with existing software solutions to mitigate impact on existing end-to-end user processes. 
• Timely and accurate billing: of Street Manager service charges on behalf of DfT, enabling funds to be invested back into the service and thereby ensuring continuous improvement. 

Why DfT chose Kainos

• Substantial transport expertise and strong track record of working with executive agencies of DfT, including DVSA for whom Kainos has been a trusted partner, delivering multi award-winning services to innovate the MOT scheme, the driving test and driving theory test, leveraging cloud modernisation, digital/data transformation, and artificial intelligence. 
• Pioneering Service Design expertise building the right thing at the right time. 
• Leading digital transformation experts with proven track record of delivering national scale services across Government, successfully passing GDS service assessment at all stages. 
• Mature Support Services which provide end-to-end solution management, from cloud infrastructure to the application layer, blending service improvement with defect resolution, to ensure user needs, business goals and performance targets are realised.

The service has been recognised by DfT as an exemplar digital delivery project and has been nominated for industry awards (Best use of new technology in the Highways industry 2020, Highways Award and Cross Sector Digital Collaboration, Digital Leaders 100).