Case Study
Enhanced operational and planning capability through harmonised urban data streams
Surrey County Council
Customer:
Country:
UK
Urban Data Exchange (UDX) real-time data sharing platform
UDC Solution:
To enable Surrey County Council to improve its operational performance in public service delivery and future planning capabilities, a streamlined and secure solution was required that would combine and harmonise real-time urban data from emerging IoT systems and infrastructure in a way that would be easier to use and share.
The Challenge
The Solution
The UDX real-time data sharing platform was rapidly deployed, enabling fast onboarding of data streams from a wide range of urban infrastructure vendors, all with differing APIs, dashboards, and service backends. UDX harmonised these streams, providing a unified, standards-compliant view across all infrastructure data.
In addition to delivering significant staff time savings when creating and sharing real-time data streams, Surrey County Council can more easily control who has access to their data and additionally has the option to monetise their data when appropriate in future. Supplier service performance is also easier to monitor, and infrastructure downtime can be responded to more efficiently.
Benefits
Responsible for delivering local public services for a non-metropolitan region with a population of 1.2m people, Surrey County Council (SCC) has been proactively exploring a range of innovative technology solutions that will help them to be more efficient, allow for improved planning and decision making, and to provide superior services for their communities.
Central to the wide selection of digital infrastructure acquired by SCC are the sensors and IoT systems that provide real-time data from energy meters, EV charge points, smart parking sensors, road surface temperatures, weather stations and air quality monitors. Provided by a multitude of different vendors, each of these systems feature their own custom APIs, dashboards, and service backends, presenting a major challenge for SCC when different data streams need to be combined to provide broader, harmonised, and more coherent insights. Separate systems impeded data sharing with various internal stakeholders and third parties, with a lot of time being spent exporting and manipulating data into formats that would be fit for purpose.
“Urban Data Collective have provided a cost-effective and robust solution to share data across the Surrey County Council seamlessly. By freeing data from existing silos we are working towards delivering services for the residents of Surrey faster and more efficiently.”
Ian Ballantyne / Digital Transformation Programme Manager, Surrey County Council
With these data challenges set to increase over time as digital infrastructure is augmented and updated, SCC approached Urban Data Collective to help create a centralised, secure, and easy to access system that would streamline real-time data feeds and make data easier to use and share. Utilising our core UDX data exchange platform, Urban Data Collective was able to setup a customised portal and onboard various real-time data streams. These data streams were harmonised into compliant, standards-based formats and APIs, providing simple to use and unified access across all supplier systems.
Appropriate meta-data was also created for the streams and data adapters, unlocking the potential for re-use of data by other councils using the same vendor systems. With the UDX platform at the heart of their real-time data management strategy, SCC is now able to leverage their data far more efficiently and integrate it into the workflows of different council departments.
With a fast implementation of under two weeks, SCC’s customised platform has resulted in:
Significant staff time saved in the creation, use, and sharing of urban data streams
Control over who can access SCC’s data, including creation of data licences or sharing agreements and opportunities to monetise their data
Easier monitoring of service performance across their supplier systems and SLAs, combined with faster responses to infrastructure downtime
Ability to provide SCC data to neighbouring councils, minimising their need for costly infrastructure investment, and improving service resilience
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