Transport for London
Transport for London (TfL) is responsible for London’s buses, the Underground, the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) and the management of Croydon Tramlink and London River Services, plus the Dial-a-Ride scheme, Victoria Coach Station and London’s Transport Museum. TfL also looks after a 580km network of main roads and all of London’s 4,600 traffic lights, as well as the London Congestion Charging scheme and regulation of the city’s taxis and private hire trade.
Business need
TfL has a number of enterprise content management (ECM) implementations, with additional new projects planned. An integral part of TfL’s strategy is to coordinate and rationalize ECM initiatives and systems across its diverse activities.
In a little over three months, with a small team of specialist information analysts, Bramble.cc was able to develop and hand over to TfL an information architecture that will provide a corporate layer within the new ECM framework. The architecture will help to:
- create a bridge between information silos, thereby facilitating a unified view of TfL’s information, both for the company and its numerous partners and stakeholders
- bring benefits both in efficiency (saved staff time and IM costs) and effectiveness (through staff and stakeholders being better informed)
- enable cross-application information collection / retrieval and facilitate the configuration of ECM applications, saving duplicated effort, accelerating development and providing answers to common development dilemmas
Good practice
The information architecture includes a corporate file plan, information types, metadata library, subject matter vocabularies, records classification and an access control model. It has been developed from existing standards and ways of working, but steered towards good practice in the public and transport sectors.
It has been validated with user representatives, who are vital to the communication of the architecture as a standard, and delivered to a small, in-house team who have been tutored in its future development and maintenance.
Alignment with standards
Bramble.cc has assisted TfL in moving very rapidly to a mature state of capability in ECM. All this with requisite consultation suitable for an organisation of many thousands of staff, and alignment with essential standards such as eGMS, IPSV and GPMS, providing supporting documentation and implementation recommendations. This work was undertaken on a fixed price, firm-deadline basis.