How National Highways Uses ThoughtSpot to improve Road Safety

The Challenge: Siloed Systems, Stale Data, and Operational Hurdles

Historically, operational decisions across England's Strategic Road Network relied heavily on instinct and restrictive legacy databases. Data was scattered across more than 15 disjointed systems, each requiring specialist technical knowledge to access.

For the organisation’s 7000+ direct employees and many tens of thousands of partners & supply chain, obtaining basic answers was slow. Operating with a lean data team, analysts were overwhelmed by ad-hoc requests. Non-technical staff, including regional managers and on-road engineers, could not fetch information independently. Simple requests required complex SQL scripts, causing ~5-day delays for basic follow-ups. Critical control room reports were delivered quarterly, leaving leadership with lagging insights.

Physical constraints compounded these delays. Security policies for the legacy "ControlWorks" database required accessing information from dedicated office terminals. In one extreme case, a staff member had to make a 150-mile round trip just to sit at a specific workstation to view an incident log to resolve a customer complaint.

The Solution: Accessible Data via a Centralised Analytics Engine

To eliminate these friction points, the Data Architecture Engineering team built Data as a Service (DaaS)—a unified data lakehouse running on Databricks to house National HIghways core datasets. To make this data accessible to non-technical users, National Highways implemented ThoughtSpot, providing a search-based interface that handles complex queries using simple keywords. To meet UK public sector regulations, ThoughtSpot also had to be deployed within the UK.

The platform immediately lowered the barrier to entry, allowing business users to safely query datasets covering asset conditions, incident logs, structure data, drainage data, and police incident records and more without writing code.

We come from an organisation typically made up of on-road engineers and technical operational teams. Being able to get usable data into anyone's hands in the organisation in an easy to query & easy to understand way has been amazing. We wouldn't have been able to do that in any other tool.

Andre ConwayLead Data Architect, Data Architecture Engineering Team

Centralised Data: Empowering ControlWorks

Surfacing ControlWorks data within ThoughtSpot modernized how regional teams handle live incident logs. When a motorist files an inquiry regarding an incident on a section of the network, managers no longer need to submit tickets or drive to regional centers; they can filter line-by-line incident logs directly on their laptops through thoughtspot.

This accessibility eliminated the need for single-purpose admin terminals and allowed staff to explore data creatively. For example, a system manager built a proof-of-concept report in under 20 minutes to identify network property damage details, enabling National Highways to more easily track "green claims" and recover public funds from insurance companies with greater ease when infrastructure is damaged.

ThoughtSpot changes the relationship between the average business user and the data they are consuming. It removes inherent organisational inefficiency by eliminating the need for data specialists to handle non-complicated questions. A colleague from the Southwest region doesn't need to take up an analyst's time to find out how many collisions occurred on the M5; they can find it themselves in seconds.

Brian ChappelleBusiness Systems Owner

Transforming the Road Safety Reporting

Before ThoughtSpot, compiling the Road Safety Report required analysts to spend days manually cross-referencing heavy spreadsheets containing police accident records, near-miss logs, and fleet data.

Today, the process is automated via an interactive ThoughtSpot liveboard. Instead of waiting for quarterly reports, safety analysts and directors can dynamically filter metrics on demand. Users can click through variables instantly to evaluate barrier performance, road markings, and other insights to see where & why serious incidents occurred, enabling swift infrastructure upgrades to enable a safer network.

Users can now drill down across all the data available to them at any time rather than having to wait for monthly/yearly reporting to be done, this allows them to explore new solutions quicker and drill into relevant data in seconds, without being bogged down waiting for an analyst to become available to write their query.

The thing I like about ThoughtSpot is being able to drill straight into the data. If I see something that needs investigating, I can just keep drilling down until I get to the detail I need. I can’t really do that in the same way with other analytics tools.

Flavia D’SouzaSenior Network Data and Intelligence Analyst

The Impact: Driving Operational Efficiency and Public Value

• Live Problem-Solving: Managers and non technical users can query data live during meetings, replacing weeks of follow-up with immediate decisions.
• Optimized Resources: Business self-service frees technical teams to focus on complex, strategic challenges.
• Financial & Well-being Gains: Reduced travel cuts carbon emissions and expenses while supporting flexible working and improving safety for all.

We are seeing our people becoming naturally more curious using ThoughtSpot; they are coming to our central data hub first for answers, sharing insights directly, and driving us toward a future where operational decisions are data-driven.

Ed HorsfallNetwork Data Analysis and Intelligence Team Manager

What’s Next

National Highways is currently onboarding its primary traffic management system (DYNAC) into ThoughtSpot as well as moving to a data lakehouse first approach. Moving forward, the team is preparing to activate ThoughtSpot’s full generative AI capabilities to enable natural-language conversations for all users, further reducing administrative overhead and keeping England’s Strategic Road Network running safely.