Case study Delivering invaluable insight with the UK Connected and Automated Mobility Roadmap to 2030

Zenzic, a body set up by the government and industry to co-ordinate self-driving efforts, has published the world’s first self-driving roadmap, the UK Connected and Automated Mobility Roadmap to 2030, using SharpCloud.

Tristan Bacon from Zenzic talks about how SharpCloud has helped to deliver invaluable insight across the industry. The roadmap clearly shows the connections, cross-sector interdependencies and collaboration required to get self-driving vehicles on Britain’s roads in significant numbers by 2030.

The business problem

Integral to the UK Connected and Automated Mobility Roadmap to 2030 is its ability to be used as a tool. We needed a platform/solution that would allow users to interrogate the various activities and relationships in the Roadmap, thus unlocking insights regarding their organisation’s place within the UK CAM landscape.

The roadmap is a tool, created by and intended for multiple sectors, forging new relationships and achieving collaboration across industries. It provides direction for decision makers, investors, and policy makers for the mobile future.

Why had other tools not solved this problem? 

Previous attempts with other pieces of software fell short of effectively transforming the wealth of underlying Roadmap data into a visual, interactive experience. This interactive experience was essential for the Roadmap to become an effective tool, as it would allow users to navigate through and filter the data to draw relevant insights from the Roadmap’s interconnected web of activity.

We first heard about SharpCloud from an organisation in our network who had used the tool successfully for their own project. After trialling the tool ourselves we were convinced, mainly because of the software’s features and flexible views, that SharpCloud was the platform to go for.

How is SharpCloud solving the problem?

SharpCloud provides the transformation of underlying data into an interrogable, interactive, visual experience.

Learn more about how powerful SharpCloud is when visualizing and communicating complex data.

The timeline view, used across our own SharpCloud Roadmap story, allows users to view and interact with Roadmap activity within the context of the Roadmap’s timeframe between now and 2030. Accompanied by a wealth of other features within the view, the user has the necessary tools and features to intelligently navigate the entire breadth and depth of the Roadmap.

As well as this, the platform has an intuitive interface and process for data upload and editing, affording a smooth and efficient process for updates (eg. From excel formatted data) as we continue to develop the Roadmap going forward.

Download the roadmap report and access the interactive roadmap here.

Key differentiators and features

"It's an out-of-the-box, ready-to-use tool that, because of its intuitive interface, is easy to pick up, yet also has a depth of features that allows for relatively complex visualisations and data handling."

As with any application, the ideal implementation may call for features more bespoke than those any one platform may offer. Whilst we have envisaged implementations for prospective updates that don’t directly match the capabilities of the traditional SharpCloud features, we've been most impressed with the SharpCloud team’s proactivity and ingenuity in engaging and discussing potential solutions that could be implemented.

The tagging feature has been very important for displaying the Roadmap’s “Golden Threads”, articulations of different “threads” of activity independent of the Roadmap’s theme/stream structure.

The feature allows us to tag activities in our underlying data, which can then be reduced down by a particular tag in the SharpCloud timeline view. This allows Roadmap users to easily and efficiently reduce activity down to Golden Threads that may be relevant to them.

What value is SharpCloud providing to your organisation? 

At Zenzic we are all about accelerating the self-driving revolution. Fundamental to this is driving collaboration and a common vision for the UK regarding the development and deployment of CAM. The Roadmap provides the foundation from which this can happen, building opportunities for cross-sector relationships to be forged across the CAM ecosystem.

To enable all of this, it’s important the Roadmap is publicly accessible as well as easy and intuitive for the ecosystem to use. It is through SharpCloud, and its constituent features mentioned above, that this can be made reality.