Using FME to Help Waka Kotahi (NZTA) Capitalise on Data and Transition to the Cloud

Waka Kotahi is responsible for all things transport in New Zealand. For the average Kiwi the organisation – otherwise known as the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) – is where you go to renew your driver’s licence and vehicle registration, pay tolls, advise on a change of vehicle ownership, and take care of any number of other transport-related tasks.

But the breadth and depth of responsibility shouldered by Waka Kotahi, combined with large and unrelenting demand for its services – every Kiwi car owner and licence holder needs to access its services at least once a year – proved a significant technological challenge.

Waka Kotahi utilised a robust self-service system to offer all its services through its own portal, and happily it worked well. But as with any solution, it needed to grow and evolve as the needs of its users grew and evolved.

The department knew that its data system could be improved, but was unsure how to approach the problem. The bespoke nature of the solution made updates difficult – rather than simply clicking the ‘update’ button as you would with an out-of-the-box tool, even the most minor adjustments had to be built from the ground up.

Information came into Waka Kotahi from a number of disparate sources, and would often be siloed thereafter. Any update to the solution would need to be able to pull this data from each of these sources, collate it in a way that allowed instant access to any and every piece of relevant information, and ideally offer up instant insights.

As it deals in public information, a wealth of stakeholders request information from Waka Kotahi – internal teams, government ministers and the media, to name but a few. What’s more, the number of requests was increasing over time. The organisation needed to ensure data accuracy and integrity over multiple systems, had to make that data easily accessible across these systems, and had to be able to draw it out in a timely manner.

In short, the agency wanted to earn the trust of stakeholders by providing 100% accurate information in near-real time. The decision was made to consider a better way to extract, collate and analyse information, and a simpler way to provide that information to key stakeholders, specifically by extracting and enriching Waka Kotahi’s motor vehicle register data for reporting purposes.

Already boasting a close relationship with Waka Kotahi as a part of the government vendor panel, Seamless was chosen to bridge this informational gap.

Seamless knew that their FME solution would be more than up to the task.

Seamless began by liaising with Waka Kotahi’s design, analytics, registries and database teams, all of whom were key stakeholders in the project. A significant SWOT analysis was conducted in order to analyse different approaches and find the one that would best suit. Once the path forward was made clear, joint scoping and design process sessions were held face-to-face wherever possible, and weekly project meetings kept all parties abreast of the progress of the project.

Utilising FME, the project saw address data being pulled from the data warehouse, before being geocoded with ArcGIS Online and HERE Maps. This process transformed non-spatial tabular data into usable location data, which could then be further enriched by spatially intersecting it with a wide range of authoritative location-data layers, like areas units and mesh blocks from StatisticsNZ.

The FME solution was part of a greater move to the cloud across NZTA, making data more secure and easily accessible.

After approximately two months of hands-on project work, Waka Kotahi had a fully functional solution that not only represented a serious improvement to its current system, but that also revealed the benefits of a cloud-based future, and brought the organisation a step closer to realising it.

“Seamless has been a huge asset to our team,” says Peter Willoughby, Principal Analyst at Waka Kotahi. “They have a deep knowledge of our systems and processes. They are supportive of our strategies and able to adapt to our complex and fluctuating needs. Our history of positive and successful engagement with Seamless gives me confidence in them and in the next chapter of our relationship.”

According to Project Lead Chris Duncan, Seamless was equally happy with the success of the project. “Our teams aligned really well – communication was excellent, and Waka Kotahi were every bit as invested in creating an effective solution as we were. We’re proud to have helped make such a critical organisation just that little bit better.”