Strong ‘Foundations’ Accelerate App Modernisation for National Highways

For this project, Version 1 was honoured to receive the Microsoft Global Partner of the Year Award for Modernising Applications. Read about it here. Read the full NILO case study here.

National Highways is the government company that operates, maintains, and improves England’s motorways and major A roads. In line with National Highways digital, data and technology strategy, Version 1 began work in January 2022 on delivering an application modernisation project at National Highways for NILO reporting.

“National Incident Liaison Officers (NILO’s) are one of several National Highways teams that work 24/7 365 monitoring and responding to incidents and events on England’s motorways and major A roads. Based at the National Traffic Operations Centre (NTOC) in Birmingham they provide an enhanced incident reporting service called NILO reporting. NILO reports provide the most up to date and accurate information about incidents to the media and road users which helps them to plan journey’s or avoid incidents.”  

Tim Priest, National Operations Team Leader, Operations Customer Service Division, National Highways 

Strong ‘Foundations’

Foundations is Version 1’s collection of quick-start delivery accelerators developed by our dedicated Cloud Centre of Excellence. Foundations QuickStart Delivery Accelerators are effectively prebuilt solutions that incorporate industry best practices and utilise best-of-breed open source and cloud-native technologies, representing an advanced starting point for service delivery.

Foundations enables a reduced time to market, reduced delivery risk, increased alignment to standards and improved security. Version 1 has made a significant investment in developing reusable solutions that aid and underpin our service delivery, demonstrating Version 1’s continued commitment to its mission to prove IT can make a real difference to our customers’ business.  

Foundations enables a reduced time to market, reduced delivery risk, increased alignment to standards and improved security. Utilising Foundations typically saves Version 1’s customers 6-8 weeks’ worth of time and expense. 

Davey McGlade, Head of Digital UK, Version 1

Utilising Foundations, Version 1 embarked on a 3-month modernisation project which would involve re-architecting National Highways’ NILO reporting application. 

Version 1’s National Highways delivery team were successfully able to apply Version 1’s Application Modernisation on Azure Foundations Accelerator to deliver the NILO project, enabling them to hit the ground running.

Using Foundations, they spent less time in the setup phase, often known as “Sprint 0”, instead focusing more quickly on implementing the Functional Business Requirements, whilst at the same time incorporating industry best practices from the start.

“The move towards the Cloud to run modern Digital customer experiences means Application Modernisation of legacy applications is an important priority for many of our customers, including National Highways, who continuously strive to provide modern digital customer experiences.”

John Bolger, Head of Cloud Centre of Excellence, Version 1

Bolger also commented: “Our Application Modernisation on Azure Foundations Accelerator focuses on providing a sensible and opinionated implementation for many of the typical Non-Functional Requirements we see from customers, including Infrastructure as Code, Cloud Configuration and DevSecOps Pipelines incorporating best practices such as Code quality analysis, Static and Dynamic Application Security Testing (SAST & DAST), and important Test Automation components such as Accessibility Testing and Performance Testing. Providing reference implementations for these requirements “Out of the Box” enables us to apply a “Shift Left” philosophy to delivery, whereby Security, Testing and Code Quality Analysis become part of the development lifecycle from the beginning. For NILO, we have calculated that Foundations has saved around 7 weeks of Infrastructure provisioning effort, in addition to streamlining any architectural and security review processes.” 

“In line with National Highways Digital, data and technology strategy the NILO team worked with Version 1 to modernise NILO reporting by developing a new Azure based Web Application. Using an Agile project approach, the new app was designed, developed, tested, and deployed in a little over 3 months. NILO reporting is now a faster more comprehensive reporting service than ever before ensuring National Highways customers have a better experience, stress free journeys and improved journey times when travelling.” 

Tim Priest, National Operations Team Leader, Operations Customer Service Division, National Highways 

Davey McGlade, Head of Digital UK, at Version 1 commented on the success of the engagement with National Highways:

“I’m delighted with this outcome for National Highways. NILO is a critical application that was originally built using legacy technologies. From the onset, we’ve focused on meeting user needs, maximising the value delivered, and to develop the new solution using modern Microsoft Azure and .NET Technologies. We’ve worked closely with National Highways to align to their engineering, architectural and security standards, with the result being a successful agile delivery that was on time and within budget.”

Ongoing Partnership

This news follows Version 1 being selected in 2021 as an Application Development and Maintenance (ADM) partner to deliver support and modernisation solutions for 45 of National Highway’s key line of business applications. Version 1 has transitioned support from the incumbent Systems Integrator with the new service live as of June 2021. 

Global Award-Winning Project:

In 2023, Version 1 was named Global Microsoft Partner of the Year Award in the category of Modernizing Applications.Version 1 was recognised for providing outstanding solutions and services in Modernizing Applications for its innovative transformation of a critical application for National Highways’ National Incident Liaison Officers (NILO).