Ok, over the past 6 months or so, I've been quite busy on this large complex programme (hence the radio silence), but on the eve of the new year, I felt it necessary and appropriate to capture my thoughts and vision for upcoming year, in particular, the subject of 'harnessing the power of big data'.
It goes without saying that, effective infrastructure planning and investment decisions are made when all the relevant asset data available are taken into consideration. The best possible source for such data is a well-designed data warehouse. We are therefore investing in development of sophisticated data storage systems, where we can take advantage of both structured and unstructured asset data.
Over the course of 2016/17, the projects that I'm leading will set the core foundations upon which these asset systems will be based, for example, the project will deploy a new Network Model with enhanced ‘connected network’ capability. Increasingly, we are moving towards setting up of a ‘data lake’ design that serves as the central repository for the organisation's incoming asset data streams. In such architecture, subsets of asset data can be processed for analysis in the data warehouse with analytical tools efficiently and at lower costs.
Over the same period, I intend for my teams to develop wider analytical tools, to complement our existing ‘Pavements Investment Tool’, such as analytical tool for structures assets. The objective is to help management take more informed business decisions by enabling asset data managers, predictive asset modellers and service providers analyse large volumes of data and translate these into knowledge and wisdom, by uncovering patterns, correlations, trends etc.
By end of the 2020, the aspiration is to leverage the advancement in digital technologies to transform the way we capture, store and use asset data, to be more cost effective, productive and practical in generating actionable insights.
