Transforming tolling: the new platform taking Transurban technology global
Like most things in the last 50 years, road tolling has transformed from an analogue ‘throw a coin in a bucket’ proposition, to a digital payment network that allows drivers to get from point A to point B without disruption. For the user, the experience is better than before. It’s seamless and hassle free. But the technologists in the room, or the car, know the complexity of platforms and systems that need to work together to make it seem that easy.
The Transurban challenge
As a company that runs toll roads in three countries across two continents, the business considerations behind finding and funding systems that can scale efficiently presents a pretty unique challenge: The Transurban challenge.
In most cases, roads are public infrastructure that is state-owned and operated. Governments don’t need to consider how to use technology across vast geographies, they just need to make sure the road in their jurisdiction is well maintained and safe. As a Top 15 company on the Australian Stock Exchange, managing networks of roads in each of our geographies, our requirements are a little different. We need technology that will support our operations across all of our markets, but be integrated and efficient enough that we aren’t running multiple, siloed systems.
Our tolling platform is central to maintaining this balance. It’s the piece that sits between all of the equipment hanging on the road and our back-end customer portals — where all the data processes and business logic unique to tolling occur.
As the first electronic toll operator in Australia we engineered the current platform, known as GLIDe in-house. But as Transurban continues to grow, it is time to take on this challenge globally, and create a system that will continue to work across all of our assets and markets.
What’s the new way?
The transport industry is, without irony, at a cross roads. Ride sharing apps and low emission, electronic and automated vehicles are changing the way we travel, and this is only set to increase as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning become more mainstream in the coming decades.
To face into this disruption we needed a core business platform that was extremely adaptable to change to advances in technology and that could flex to new and emerging government and consumer expectations across all our regions.
Going to market to procure a technology solution when technology is changing so quickly doesn’t make sense in this new environment. The rigid process leaves no room for iteration or innovation, and ties operators into multi-year delivery cycles that end up delivering outdated capability.
Transurban sits at the nexus of these challenges, and decided the best solution was to build a bespoke next generation tolling platform that positioned us for the future.
Building it from the ground up
Architecture is central to any technology-led business transformation. This is not just about linking the software, but creating a flexible technical model, that mirrored our business and operations. As Conway’s law suggests, your technology systems will take on the form of your organization. If we were creating a platform that could support change and scale across our global footprint, we would also need a team structure that could do the same.
We chose a Federated Services Architecture for the new platform, with a core set of principles that tackled both the procurement and industry challenges, with a core set of principles that met our strategy and would give us the choice to put the best possible solution forward for any industry proposal and was powered 100% by cloud computing, micro-services and automation.
In a model like this, onboarding the right people is the most important success factor so our team design followed a similar approach. Development teams were federated across the technical product boundaries, and in some cases across our geographical and hemispherical boundaries, positioning the team for support and growth globally but not being slowed down by highly-coupled dependencies.
Choosing the right partner to help achieve this organizational team scale was critical. We turned to our partner Versent, an award winning group in Amazon Web Services (AWS) partnering. With Versent’s expertise in cloud and ability to flex our talent pool, along with our internal domain knowledge, technical leadership and management expertise, it was the perfect blend of people to take on this global challenge.
Combining these architectural concepts with Agile software development methodologies and a DevOps approach to running the platform, positioned us for success in a model where it was OK to not have all the answers up front.
Where are we now?
With these objectives well defined, we got to work building the tool. Within the first 12 months we had five teams established, five minimally viable products (MVPs) and a base platform complete with 100% continuous delivery automation in the cloud.
As we move towards our second full year of funding, we have a fully-fledged platform demonstrating tangible value back to the business.
- The next generation tolling system now runs all image review services (linking license plates to driver details to send a toll bill) for all US toll roads.
- In the next 12 months it will run all tolling services on one of our Australian assets.
- From there, we will continue our group wide alignment and migrate more of the business onto the platform starting with our US roads.
- This model has also helped to shape some new strategic initiatives we hadn’t thought of. The US team have created a mobile retail app allowing customer to pay for their tolls which is launching soon for customers across the state of Virginia, an outcome that may have not come to fruition before we started thinking and working in this way.
What’s next?
Transurban prides itself on being a pioneer in tolling and transport, our focus is on solving urban transport needs. While the transformation we have taken on may sound commonplace in the commercial tech world, in our industry, internal investment in this central part of our ecosystem is unprecedented. This work is setting us up for a world of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) and future transport options as the tolling world moves away from being a closed system to one with open API interfaces and gateways for third-party transport and mobility partners. A platform that ties leans into linking multi modal transport options is critical in connecting what the future has to offer with our expertise in transport.
Speaking from personal experience, with a career in both technology and tolling, the reason I work for Transurban is the out-of-the-box opportunity my team and I have to change way this industry operates and I am looking very much ahead at these exciting times to come.
