The Challenge

The National Highways digital estate is a highly complex ecosystem, comprising 130 suppliers and 40 services. As the technological backbone of England’s motorways and major A roads, seamless collaboration across these services and their supporting systems is essential. National Highways’ Strategic Road Network (SRN) enables over four million journeys each day and carries a third of all road traffic, making reliability paramount. Any breakdown in communication or system functionality could lead to issues like inaccurate live signage or unreported road obstructions, posing significant risks to the safety of road users.

»On the operational side, our technology supports critical safety functions, so timings are critical,« says Stephen Walker, Head of Service Management at National Highways, whose role was created to bring greater consistency, governance, and best practice to how IT services are managed across the organisation. »When an alert is received, our Operations team works to tirelessly protect public safety by responding within a matter of seconds, so any impact to that service needs to be recognised, understood and restored quickly and efficiently.«

Prior to partnering with Netcompany, National Highways had challenges managing their multiple IT service providers and lacked a single partner who could provide and oversee a robust and reliable service management framework. Without a unified set of policies, processes and procedures, it was difficult to maintain consistency across key practices, such as incident tracking, problem management and software change implementation.

The solution 

In 2019, National Highways engaged us to manage and coordinate their diverse suppliers and internal support teams, ensuring that all technologies and services work seamlessly together. 

Building on this foundation, we now provide a comprehensive service management capability across both the corporate IT and operational technology estates. This includes governance of key ITIL practices – such as major incident, incident, problem, and change management – to ensure consistent service delivery and operational resilience. We actively support National Highways’ service management function, enabling continual improvement, facilitating knowledge and skills transfer that help improve the capabilities of internal teams.  

To drive service improvement, we conducted a thorough review and analysis, establishing practices to measure and manage supplier performance, and providing detailed reports and recommendations to National Highways’ senior leadership for ongoing enhancement across all areas. 

Results

»When I started in post three and a half years ago, I was regularly joining major incident calls every day or every other day – out of hours, weekends, all of that – because the team was struggling to manage,« says Stephen. »Since moving over to Netcompany, I haven’t needed to do that as the team has taken hold of it themselves. They’ve got the trust of operations and the roadside staff, and it’s working really well.«

Through our structured approach to service management, we have helped minimise risk, reduce unplanned outages, and ensure rapid service restoration when issues arise.

From the go-live of the service, our focus was on transforming National Highways’ Service Management function – helping it evolve into a more structured, process-driven capability that spans corporate IT and operational technology domains. 

This transformation laid the groundwork for a strategic roadmap of continual improvement initiatives, targeting early “quick wins” and standardising ITIL-aligned processes. By embedding best practices and driving operational maturity, Netcompany continues to support National Highways in building a resilient, future-ready service management function. 

»Our change enablement function has been recognised by audits and stakeholders as very robust. In my time here, we’ve seen far fewer unplanned or failed changes, which has made it much safer to operate in this environment,« says Stephen. 

Netcompany also delivers a wide range of other services for National Highways, including modernising legacy infrastructure by migrating virtual desktops to Azure Virtual Desktop, supporting the adoption and education of Microsoft 365 tools, and providing remote support for the End User Compute estate. In addition, we provide services in areas such as asset management strategy, network migration, domain controller upgrades, active directory remediation, Power Platform governance, and seamless transitions for critical technology contracts.  

The road ahead 

In November 2024, we extended our five-year partnership with National Highways for another two years, broadening the scope to include operational technology service management alongside corporate IT. This allows National Highways to work with a single supplier for all service management, helping to reduce downtime, improve road safety, and strengthen the resilience of the UK’s strategic road network. 

The partnership aims to deliver practical improvements by consolidating and modernising policies, processes, and procedures, supporting National Highways’ goals for a safer and more efficient road network. With a unified approach to service management, National Highways can drive greater effectiveness and efficiency, promote best practices, and respond more quickly to challenges – enhancing the experience for the UK’s road users.