Data that makes a difference

Yesterday, I attended an event, Maintenance of Infrastructure Assets Using Geospatial Insights. It was organised by the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), the network partner of Innovate UK. What we discussed affects you, me and everyone in how we move and travel, consume water, how we communicate and how we heat our homes and businesses.

What struck me from today’s conversation is how vital geospatial and satellite data is to infrastructure companies like Amey. We’re using all kinds of data not just to make good business decisions but also to provide better services to the public. For example, with one of our utility clients, we use satellite information to monitor ground movements in water infrastructure to enable us to detect the potential for sinkholes. Averting sinkholes potentially saves lives, reduces flood risks and helps save water. In the rail sector, our colleagues have used data to significantly reduce delays, demonstrating the performance improvement that can be achieved through data at a much lower cost than infrastructure upgrades. You can read more on this in a story from Amey this week in New Civil Engineer.

The UK invested heavily in infrastructure during the 1980s and the reality now is that across water, rail, energy, electricity and telecommunications, we are a nation that has what you might call middle aged assets. It’s therefore crucial that we invest in renewing our infrastructure but even more crucial that for existing, ageing assets, we use data to inform us about existing or potential performance issues. As one of my co-panellists at yesterday’s event pointed out, if you’re maintaining assets that are between 50 and 100 years old and doing so on a tight budget, using clean, accurate data to help you understand how they are performing is critical to being able to deliver a service that the public expects.

The big difference now is that whereas previously, infrastructure builders and operators saw themselves as managers of infrastructure, now they see themselves as providers of the services you and I use every day. They might be B2B in terms of their clients but ultimately, they’re delivering a public service. At a time when the public quite rightly voices its opinion when public infrastructure doesn’t live up to expectations, our sector is only too aware of the reputational and financial impact of not paying close enough attention to consumers’ needs.

One particularly pressing need of the public is to be able to travel and live more sustainably. The way we will meet this need is for the best minds in infrastructure design and operations to get together with the best minds in geospatial technology and data analysis to come up with solutions to the big challenges of our time. How do we lower CO2 emissions, save water, reduce energy consumption, cut waste, recycle more, etc., etc.?

Data is helping us meet these challenges. It’s starting to make a difference – but with greater insight through closer collaboration, we could achieve even more.