Episode 2 – Data is a strategic asset, Chacasta Pritlove, Google Cloud
Epsiode intro
Welcome to the Interchange podcast, produced in association with Arcadis and hosted by Ayo Abbas.
This podcast talks about how integrated transport infrastructure is the solution to achieving a more effective and decarbonised transport network. Chacasta Pritlove, Head of Transport, UK Public Sector from Google Cloud is our guest today.
In this episode we look at:
Why data should be treated like any other critical infrastructure asset
How data is ultimately about creating the best experience for the customer
Why more transport modes should be sharing anonymised data to create a seamless passenger experience.
The importance of having accessible data that people can easily interact with for more effective decision making.
Why we should be upskilling everyone in digital skills.
Chacasta Pritlove
Chacasta Pritlove is the Head of Transport, UK Public Sector from Google Cloud. She is a passionate and creative thought-leader, driving digital transformation across transport, infrastructure and the wider industry - with 25 years’ experience in enterprise technology, and a focus on the public sector for the past 15. She is proud to have earned the role of trusted partner to several large organisations across the public sector which focus on integrated, seamless and sustainable transportation.
Resources and Links
The Rail Delivery Group Rail Marketplace
About Interchange UK
Interchange is much more than a podcast. It's also a major two-day annual conference and exhibition taking place in on February 27 and 28th in Manchester Central. Head to www.interchange-uk.com to find out more.
Transcript
SPEAKERS
Chacasta Pritlove, Ayo Abbas
Chacasta Pritlove
You also need to treat data as your strategic asset as well. Data also needs to be invested in it needs to be. I've already said well curated it needs to be maintained. It needs to be looked after. And it needs to be set free.
Ayo Abbas
Hello and welcome to the Interchange podcast produced in association with Arcadis with me, Ayo Abbas Interchange is a show where we delve into talking about integrated transport infrastructure as the solution to achieving a more effective and decarbonise transport network. Our guest today is Chacasta Pritlove, who is the head of transport UK public sector for Google Cloud, we talked about the importance of treating data as an infrastructure asset, just like roads, or bridges, how data is ultimately about the customer, and that they should be at the centre of everything we do, including sharing data across nodes for a seamless passenger experience. In this chat, we talked about the importance of treating data as an infrastructure asset, just like roads or bridges, how data is ultimately about the customer, why we should be sharing data across notes for a seamless passenger experience. And finally, why having accessible data that people can easily interact with it's so important for decision making. Anyway, I'll let you get on with listening to the interview. Enjoy. Hi, Chacasta. And thanks so much for coming on to the Interchange podcast. Can you introduce yourself and your role at Google Cloud?
Chacasta Pritlove
Sure and thanks for having me. So I work in our public sector team, here at Google Cloud. I look after the transport vertical. So I look after the Department for Transport. I look after all of the agencies within that, I effectively stop when we come to local transport, and local government. And my colleagues cover that and I work for very closely with them to look at the whole transport ecosystem. I also worked really closely with my colleagues in the enterprise side of our business who are looking after the private sector, transport companies. So the airlines and the airports and the coach companies and things like that.
Ayo Abbas
I'm gonna ask a question, which is a basic question. But how does like Google Cloud impact those verticals? What's your impact? And what what's the connection?
Chacasta Pritlove
From a cloud perspective, the way that we impact those, those transport of verticals are really about data. And we help those clients utilise data to the best of its abilities, so that they can provide a phenomenal customer experience. So they can provide a fantastic service so that they can look at what has been done in the past, and predict what is going to happen in the future. So that they are able to respond quickly to that, to deliver that fantastic customer experience and service that we all want from from our transport networks,
Ayo Abbas
which we certainly do, that's for sure. I guess my following question is, so what does integrated transport mean to you? What's, what's your definition of it? And why do you think it's important?
Chacasta Pritlove
So I think, to me, it means building a transport infrastructure that puts the passenger and the freight users at the heart of every decision that's been made. What you want from an integrated transport infrastructure is to make everybody's journeys as seamless and as frictionless as possible. And that's really got to be about multi modality. In fact, it's got to be mode agnostic, because this is about all of those different modes, and all of those parts of the ecosystem coming together to build a service that delights everybody. So I mean, and that's one of the reasons why we got involved with with interchange, because we know that interchange feels passionately about that. And so do we. And for us, this is what we do at Google every single day. Yes, our top priority is focused on the user, and everything else will follow. And what we mean by that is, when we build products, we build them in a way that people love to use, because if we do that, then they use them. So we don't focus on our internal goals, or we don't focus on our own bottom line, we focus on what is super important to our customers. And that is to keep things intuitive to keep it simple, to make it easy. And then everything else will take care of itself, because people will just love to use it. And then everything else. I think there's an ethos that served us, in Google's business really well over the last 25 years. You we've now have Google workspace, which is using 3 billion monthly active users. And from a transport perspective. As an example, we've worked with one of our partners Carto, with the Department of Transportation in Hawaii, and they're using our platform and Carto's platform to take that data and take that AI and utilise it to mitigate the effects of climate change that is happening on their coastal infrastructure. And that allows them to provide a better service to their customers. By making sure that those coastal roads are open and available for use, but they've also taken another step, and using that data, and then presenting that to their customers on a regular basis, so that the customers are kept informed. So it's always our plan as well, though, right? Exactly.
Ayo Abbas
It's the whole planning and resilience when you start looking at climate change, isn't it? And it's understanding what you need to have in place in your infrastructure and how to use it. And, and data is going to fuel you to be able to do that better, right?
Chacasta Pritlove
Yeah, absolutely. Data is involved in every single decision making process. As humans, we all make decisions every single day. But if you're making those decisions on really well curated, well managed data, then you're making the most informed decisions possible. And that's what we are trying to do, and trying to help our customers to do as well.
Ayo Abbas
And in terms of I know, you mentioned AI in that in that in that response. And are you finding that AI is doing the, I guess, number crunching more and masses of data? Or is it more that it's opening up new opportunities and new ways of doing things? How are you finding that and incorporating that into the workspaces that Google are working on?
Chacasta Pritlove
I think it's, it's a bit of both, I think, at the moment, the use cases that we're seeing around AI is really more about removing the toil. So we talk a lot about toil. Yeah, and there's a lot of stuff that has to be done within an IT infrastructure. And it's quite mundane. And so you can even when you're running your, your Cloud Console, you're having alerts popping up at you left, right and centre. And to being able to sort the wheat from the chaff and use AI to help you prioritise which alerts are the most important and which aren't. So that you can actually do your job better. So we're seeing a lot of a lot of that. And obviously, with the advent of generative AI that's exploded this year, we're seeing a lot of use cases around helping people to self serve data. So when we talk about our modern data strategy, one of the one of the pillars in there is data experience. And it's really about democratising that data, and allowing everybody within an organisation the ability to, to interact with that data. Now, what large language models do is give you the ability to search that data in natural language. So I was talking to a team a few months back. And it is their job to take all of this data, make sense of it, and then produce reports. And they said that 25% of their time is spent on people having read a report coming back to them and going, could you just tweak that slightly? And could you just show me or that's really interesting. But I'd really like to see it this way. Yeah, with generative AI. Using those large language models, you can allow your users to search that data in natural language literally just typing in, could you show me this, that and the other, and then that data, it will be brought back to them. They don't have to have access to the underlying data. And you can stop them surfacing PII information, for example, if that's included in the data, so you've got the ability to determine what people can and can't see. But it allows it's it stops that team having, frees up 25% of that team's time by being able to allow the users to self serve with that data. And actually, that ends up getting them the data faster so that they can make the decisions faster. So it's just removing toil from the system.
Ayo Abbas
And I guess it's also giving people, people agency, right? It means that people can actually go in and actually take that data themselves. And you're more likely to use it in more making.
Chacasta Pritlove
Yeah, precisely and this is, and this is super, super important. And you'll hear me talking about this a lot. And I'm going to be talking about at Interchange as well, is that within the transport industry, assets are bridges, tunnels, Rails, physical things that you can touch and that you need to invest in and you need to maintain. And my counter to that is yes, absolutely, they are. But you also need to treat data as your strategic asset as well. Data also needs to be invested in it needs to be, I've already said well curated, it needs to be maintained, it needs to be looked after. And it needs to be set free. So that, as you've just said, people can use it whenever they need to. So that's a big thing for me at the moment is, is trying to evangelise about the fact that data is an asset that is as important as all of the other assets within the transport infrastructure. And yeah,
Ayo Abbas
Its such a great analogy as well, because you start to think of it in that way. And you're like, it needs investment. You need to look after it, all of that stuff, isn't it?
Chacasta Pritlove
Yeah, absolutely. And it's really interesting as well, because from a data perspective, the more data is used, the more valuable it becomes. And it's really important to have, and especially when you're talking about AI, it's super important to have a data platform that is robust, secure, and the data within it being well curated and well maintained. Because if you don't have that it's garbage in and it's garbage out. Yeah. And that's only heightened by artificial intelligence. Right. So you've got to make sure that you're investing in that. And I guess,
Ayo Abbas
in terms of data, and integrated transport, what barriers and blockers and what enablers do you see happening in the industry? What things do you think can make more make this work better?
Chacasta Pritlove
I mean, the obvious one is, is data sharing at the moment, especially across modes. So at the moment, the whole industry is siloed. And it's thinking and we all know it, and we all talk about it, and we all say, oh, yeah, it's got to be broken down, and we've got to all start coming together, but then everybody goes back to their day job.
Ayo Abbas
But how can we make this happen?
Chacasta Pritlove
I think we are I think we're making really, really good strides. And I think, what our, what rail delivery group are doing with the rail data marketplace, I think is is super interesting. And I think the ability to then allow, it's called the rail data marketplace, right. But the information contained within that rail data marketplace, is super important to highways, it's super important to the airlines into the, into the supply chain and logistics and, and all of that. So I think, but actually just having that marketplace there and serving that data up and, and giving it a place to sit, I think is is phenomenal. And I think it's a really good first step, I'd love to see the other, the other modes pulling all of that together as well. And I know that's what Davin's trying to do at National Highways. So that everybody has a view of what is out there. We have a lot of data, everybody says, oh, Google, you've got all of this data, to be fair, not our data. Yeah. So there's that that we have to deal with, but what we do do is provide an awful lot of information through things like waste for cities. So that takes all of the waste data and it aggregates it, anonymizes it and it provides it to public sector entities free of charge with a six month history, so that they can see what is happening in their in their areas. Another element that we that we do is environmental in sites explorer, where we take information from Google Maps. Again, we aggregate it, and we anonymize it. And we present it to public sector organisations. And they can use that platform to push their own data into it. But they can see buildings emissions, they can see traffic emissions. And I think they're looking at air quality is one of the things that's being worked on at the moment. And again, that's all stuff that we provide free of charge to public sector entities to allow them to decarbonize to run a more efficient infrastructure and to give back to the communities.
Ayo Abbas
This is a question to do public sector entities know how to utilise this information.
Chacasta Pritlove
I think that varies. And I think, if you look at some of the STBs, so like, Transport for the North, doing fantastic things with data analytics, they've developed the common analytical framework that's being adopted by the rest of the rest of the STBs. But then I think, when you go down to into the more local and local transport levels, the digital skills there, I think, are, are lacking, and they have so much to do. And they have so many drains on their time and on their resources, they're very, very limited resources, it is really difficult for them. And one of the things that we're trying to do is provide digital training, we have our Google Cloud skills boost, and we've got various courses on there that are available to everybody, for free, to give people that grounding in in digital and data and trying to lift those skills up to the levels that they need to be, it's, uh, we're not there yet. And it's something that we really feel needs to be picked up, because I think the positive side is, if you start to do that, and we've, we're all very well aware that the transport industry is, is ageing, and there aren't, we don't see enough people coming into the industry. And I think if you can build an industry, where you can point to the fact that you're using the most advanced data analytical skills, where you've got people, companies like Google, working within that industry to draw people in, and to encourage people to consider transport as a career choice. I think that's got to be a positive thing. Right? So yeah, it's there are different, there are multiple things that need to be doing. And, we're trying in our way to help,
Ayo Abbas
because that digital skills gap is across the UK or across society.
Chacasta Pritlove
oh yeah, it is, it's not just transport.
Ayo Abbas
no, and we've got this whole, we've got all this data, and you're they go, but it's all there for the taking. But it's just it's the upscaling of what the opportunity is, isn't it? Because that's the thing, you're they're going, we could
Chacasta Pritlove
and it's not it's not necessarily just about having those, hardcore digital coding skills, right. It's about understanding the impact that data can actually have on jobs where you wouldn't really necessarily think that data was was it was that important? I've worked with clients, where people will go out and plot where an asset is, and they won't do it particularly, particularly accurately, because they can see the asset, they know where it is. And they know when they go back next time, it's going to be there again, just like always, there. It's about there, actually, not understanding the impact that then has on actually when somebody's looking at that digital representation and going, okay, so it's here.
Ayo Abbas
It's not precise,
Chacasta Pritlove
it's not precise enough, so that then that causes problems down the line. So, as an example, you take that latitude and longitude that lat long, and you plot it on Google Maps. And it turns out that that asset is, 10 metres away from where it actually is, that can cause real problems when you're when you're trying to do some predictive analytics on it or whatever.
Ayo Abbas
Yeah. I guess it's those little things, isn't it? It's like actually, having precise does matter.
Chacasta Pritlove
Having, having that ground source of truth. So having, and that goes back to having that really robust data platform where all of your data, you can trust it. And I think that's one of the big issues that we see in transport at the moment is that people don't trust the data that's there. And, and as I say, in some cases, probably, quite rightly, when you're worried,
Chacasta Pritlove
So it does need to be a bit more robust across the piece. And in terms of in your ideal world, I mean, how would you, if we will say, looking forward to 2035, and we were looking at integrated transport, infrastructure? What would that look like,
Chacasta Pritlove
from a user perspective, it would look like I could walk out of my door, and I would be able to, so I live near Winchester. So I would love to be able to walk out my door, walk to the bus stop, be able to get a bus that will take me directly to the station, which will take me directly from Winchester into Waterloo, and then get me across to Victoria. So that I could go to my office and then come home again, without me having to use my car. It would be great if I could order a coffee, so that'd be waiting for me at the station when I get there. Because it's really cold today. Or, it'd be really great. If something would pop up on my phone to say, by the way, there's been a bit of a problem, your trains delayed. So we suggest you get this bus instead of the one that you're about to leave and get so that I'm not standing at a bus stop for ages really cold.
Ayo Abbas
It takes all the thinking away from you, right? It helps you, it helps your life and helps you move around.
Chacasta Pritlove
It does. It should be it should be effortless. It shouldn't take me hours to search through all of the different ticketing options that I need to look at to get from Winchester to Manchester, and find out Okay, so if I buy that one am I allowed to use that train? I don't really understand that.
Ayo Abbas
Ticketing thing does need to be like because we've got so many separate systems that you're just there going it is doesn't work.
Chacasta Pritlove
To be fair, I know that that GBRCT. They're all looking at that. And they think and it has stood up many times to say with this many ticketing options, this is not a good customer experience. So it's not as I said before, it's not just about that rail experience, it's about do I really need to go and buy a bus ticket, and then buy a train ticket and then get in an Uber or whatever. It's really just about that seamless experience where I don't have to think and I can just go when I want to where I want to pay for it. Be
Done. And now I can actually go back and check what I've paid for and make sure that it's right and I'm happy with it. That would be lovely, wouldn't it.
Ayo Abbas
It would, and on that utopian fantasy. Thank you so much for coming onto the show. I hope you enjoyed it.
Chacasta Pritlove
Thank you for having me. It's been lovely.
Ayo Abbas
Thanks for listening to Interchange. And remember, it's not just a podcast Interchange is much more. It's also a two day major exhibition and conference taking place on February the 27th and 28th in Manchester Central, head to www.interchange-uk.com To find out more.
