#yearnotes from Flood Digital Services
2019 was pretty epic I’ll be honest. The Digital Services team delivered more than ever and the output from this year is testament to their dedication and efforts #thestrategyisdelivery
We started the year at the mobile operator EE’s test lab together with Fujitsu to see the potential of cell broadcast messages and understand how mobile devices behave to this type of emergency alerting.
In March I had the opportunity to visit counterparts at the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia and hear how their digital teams are redesigning services based on user needs. I also presented our work integrating flood warnings with Google Public Alerts at the InterFlood Conference. Google Public Alerts for the Environment Agency went live in August this year and saw a substantial amount of visitors viewing our flood warning information during the Autumn floods, a real success story for partnership working.
Also in March, we launched our redesigned flood information service in a prototype form (Alpha) which included new features such as rainfall, impact levels and better navigation. We tested this with users throughout 2019 and closed it in December as we now build our public version of this service which we are very much looking forward to releasing in 2020.
Our continuous improvement of the Flood Warning System resulted in several big-ticket changes this year including the adoption of the Government platform Notify for letters and texts, a text link to the Floodline IVR service, the adoption of Amazon Polly for our text to speech service and the prototyping of an improved registration process (contact first) to name but a few.
We also secured the extension of the flood warning system contract taking us through to December 2022 and have started to prepare for our NeXt Generation Warning System (XWS). The discovery phase is scheduled to start in January 2020.
In July we spent time improving the performance of the flood information service, ensuring it could cater for greater volumes of traffic and activity. This was well worth the investment as the service has broken records this year for the number of visits. The performance of the services has been outstanding. Our flood warning system has sent millions of messages this year resulting in close to 5 million users and 47 million! pages views on the flood information service.
Throughout the year we’ve added more flood forecast levels to the live flood information service meaning more communities have the ability to assess their flood risk based on the forecast. We’ve worked on redesigning service components behind the scenes which will mean removing any delay between warnings being issued and the information appearing on GOV.UK. This will enable us to explore automation and new channels for warning dissemination as well as reducing operating costs.
We met with communities up and down the country to understand their needs and test services as well as shape the priority for what’s coming next. We attended the Impact Hack at the ODI in Leeds, supported colleagues with the Flood Warning Expansion Hack, We welcomed James Bevan to Warrington in June and supported the incident management efforts throughout the year in various duty officer roles as well as identifying how digital services can aid our situational awareness and response through the use of analytics and dashboards.
In December we welcomed Vodafone customers onto our flood warning service through automatic registration known as Extended Direct Warnings (EDW) which resulted in the Environment Agency exceeded 3 million registrations for the first time ensuring more people receive critical flood warning information in advance of flooding.
We finished the year delivering a series of successful workshops in partnership with the University of Hull, Fujitsu and EE to capture insights and responses to Cell Broadcast message content to understand how this type of emergency alerting could be best used to warn for severe flooding.
Importantly in addition to all this delivery, we’ve aimed to support the development of team members and their digital skills wherever possible through assignments, apprenticeships and other opportunities.
A lot of what we do isn’t the big-ticket items. It’s often behind the scenes keeping systems up to date, testing, reviewing performance, assisting with queries, responding to requests or managing technical debt. It is this work that is essential to keep our services operational and accurate but often doesn’t grab the headlines.
I’m immensely proud of what the Digital Services team has achieved in 2019. We’ve certainly earned our mission patches.
