Government Transport Agency improves digital services for road users with AWS cloud migration
- Industry Government
- Capability Managed Services, Applications development & integration, Cloud
- Customer Queensland Department of Transport & Main Roads
The Department of Transport and Main Roads is a department of the Queensland Government, formed in April 2009 with the merger of Queensland Transport and the Department of Main Roads. The department manages Queensland’s approximately 33,000 km state-controlled road network; its mission to move and connect people, places, goods and services safely and efficiently.
Opportunity
TMR provides state-wide information on the state’s road conditions. This information is made regularly available to road users who can phone, visit a website, or check any of seven location-focused Twitter feeds for information about incidents and hazards, closures and restrictions, road works and special events.
The TMR website typically attracted about 100,000 visitors a month, except during extreme weather events when those numbers would increase dramatically. During these traffic spikes, website performance was jeopardised due to high demand on its server capacity, but TMR was unsure it could justify the cost of purchasing technology infrastructure that would only be used during peak periods.
In addition to this, strict regulatory compliance and the need to share information across stakeholders such as Police and local councils, was hindering the efficiency of its upload process which led to a delay in getting critical information to road users.
In order to deliver on its overall objectives to contribute to people’s quality of life, Queensland’s economic wellbeing, and a sustainable environment, TMR was looking to create an integrated transport planning approach – with the overhaul of its website and processes being a critical factor in its success.
Solution
With the objectives to achieve simplicity, scalability, and speed, we were engaged to help TMR solve its website challenges, with the project broken into two phases:
Phase 1 – Website migrated to AWS cloud
A secure, seamless migration to Amazon Web Services which helped TMR dramatically improve its speed of performance and the site’s resilience, which was crucial for a high-profile service that receives a lot of political attention.
In addition to speed, the move to the cloud gave TMR the ability to automatically scale resources up or down, which meant there was no longer any need to pay for excess capacity just in case a major storm delivered a spike in demand.
Phase 2 – Move to ‘QLDTraffic’
Dubbed the ‘The Next Generation TTI’ (Transport and Traffic Integration) project, and now known as ‘QLDTraffic’, phase 2 of the project aimed to provide the Dept. with:
- A customer focused and responsive traffic and travel information service and integrated transport system to support the safe, efficient and reliable movement of people and goods.
- A single source of truth for all traffic and travel information.
- Timely dissemination of reliable and accurate information.
- A facility to allow Queensland citizens to make better informed travel decisions.
Outcomes
After delivering the above phases, TMR achieved the following business outcomes:
- Cloud-hosted, scalable, secure solution.
- Current, maintainable application technology stack to support future needs.
- Improved productivity due to simplified data entry workflow and a better user experience which limits input and editing time for TMR staff.
- Efficient workflows which means updates are now live within minutes (previously 1-4 hours).
- Modern, user-friendly and responsive public website to support a greater user experience.
- Fully scalable, globally accessible platform.
- Lower operating costs.
- Application Managed Services – Application lifecycle management under a Devops and agile delivery model.
NRI Application Managed Services
Our Application Managed Service (AMS) provided to TMR includes delivery of full Application lifecycle Management governed by Agile and ITIL best practices. Our DevOps approach focuses on delivering value as often and as early as possible, governed by operational processes, quality assurance, and standardised tooling to ensure the continuous delivery and stability of these services.
Our AMS partnership with TMR has allowed the service model to evolve together under a continual service improvement initiative. This has assisted with streamlining and stabilising operational support services whilst also delivering new and innovative features to support business processes.
Some examples of on-going and future planned continual improvement activities include:
- Architectural improvements leveraging new cloud first (AWS) services to improve performance and security, and reduce costs.
- Working closely with the business and technology suppliers to ensure platform is current, in order to be agile in meeting new business and community needs.
- Automated testing via modern GUI based process automation software.
- Assisting in overall strategic vision to reduce on-premise footprint with a cloud first mindset.
- Utilise and share data through interagency and public data sharing to enable more robust data.
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