CIO interview: Victoria Higgin, Highways England
Summary
Highways England also needs to be connected to local authorities, as Higgin explains: “Nobody’s road journey starts or ends on the motorway. This is supported by digital technologies and data to enable Highways England to deliver safer, smoother and more reliable journeys for its customers. “We are also looking at apprentice and graduate schemes.” Internal development is especially important in roles where there is huge demand in the market, such as enterprise architecture, data science and cyber security. “There is no end of opportunities to develop.” Like many larger organisations, Highways England has legacy IT and technical debt, but Higgin says it is on a journey to decommission some of this older IT. “There is some stuff we won’t want to change, but we will want to do some things more digitally and take advantage of data.” She says her role at Highways England puts her in a good position to facilitate the breaking down of silos and connecting parts of the organisations together to enable end-to-end data flows and services.