TfL manage the integrated transporation system for the area of greater London. This is an enormous remit covering the underground, buses, trams, overground trains, ferries, taxis, walking, cycling and congestion charging, as well as road asset maintenance, traffic movement and parking enforcement on certain routes. All operations generate and rely upon large volumes of geographically referenced information - which is not always as accessible as it could be. With demand for transport predicated to grow and the Olympic Games around the corner, TfL need to improve capacity and service quality. TfL is made up from several business units which have separate histories, practices and technologies; the operation of this multimodal transportation system requires integration of business areas, as well as their data and systems.
TfL are developing a concept called the Geospatial Enterprise Service Platform (ESP) in order to create a shared service model around its key technology and functional capabilities. The Geospatial ESP is designed to provide a complete set of centrally hosted, discrete GIS capabilities across the entire application stack, including spatial data storage, integration, analysis, visualisation, management and dissemination. The capabilities are designed to exhibit infrastructural characteristics such as high availability, scalability reliability, performance and security and will be available to any business application as Web Services. The ESP concept addresses the business/commercial, organisational, governance, people and process aspects that need to be in place to build, deliver and support the services.
The Geospatial ESP will be one of a number of Enterprise Service Platforms within the TfL IT Strategy which are being designed to consolidate key application functions and to enable the development of integrated (rather than duplicated) applications and workflows. The objective of the ESP framework is to enable TfL to move away from creating silo business applications and start thinking in terms of shared services in order to deliver the best ROI for IT investments to enable business units to deliver world class transportation services.