Singapore’s Land Transport Authority has won the Gartner Business Intelligence (BI) Excellence Award for Asia Pacific and the CIO Asia CIO Awards for 2011 for its implementation of the Planning for Land Transport Network (PLANET) project.

PLANET, one of the largest government data warehouses in Singapore, was designed to carry out advanced data analytics on travelling patterns in Singapore whether by car, bus or train, with the aim to develop and fine-tune land transport policies.

LTA captures more than 12 million public transport transactions each day, and daily travel demand is expected to increase from the current 8.9 million journeys to 14.3 million journeys. Using existing legacy systems, executing a typical query accessing over 100 million records would take at least 20 hours. What the agency needed was an enterprise data warehouse that would give it timely access to the massive volume of current and historical data for meaningful trend analysis, long-term policy planning and data mining.

LTA captures more than 12 million public transport transactions each day, and daily travel demand is expected to increase from the current 8.9 million journeys to 14.3 million journeys.

In 2008, LTA initiated a proof-of-concept for a suitable enterprise data warehouse solution for this purpose. With encouraging results showing a 99 per cent improvement in query response times over the legacy systems, it decided to embark on a full-scale implementation of PLANET in 2009.

PLANET consolidates data from various transactional systems, performs high-volume crunching on anonymised data and presents the information from different perspectives to serve multiple purposes. “We now have comprehensive data readily available at our fingertips for the analysis of historical performance and general travelling patterns,” said Ms Rosina Howe, LTA’s Group Director of Innovation and Infocomm Technology.

With this, LTA can carry out regulatory audits, operational monitoring and reviews of existing policies more effectively. For example, the agency can track traffic flow and behaviour, passenger loading, route running times and transfer volumes for advanced trend analysis. “It gives us the ability to think the next generation ahead in seeking sustainable solutions to everyday problems for transport users,” said Ms Howe.

In the Gartner BI Excellence Awards, PLANET stood out among the submissions from 20 organisations in six Asia Pacific countries, which represented industry sectors including consumer goods, retail, banking and financial services, professional services, pharmaceuticals, education and government. Three finalists were selected to present their case studies to almost 300 delegates at the Gartner Business Intelligence and Information Management Summit in Sydney in February. Delegates then voted to select the winner.

Mr Ian Bertram, Gartner Managing Vice President and Chair of the 2011 Gartner BI Summit, said the quality of the presentations from all three finalists was outstanding and demonstrated global best practices. “This award programme shows that successful BI can be done,” he said. “Despite obvious differences in scale, industry and business strategies, the approach of all three finalists was innovative and delivered obvious results and benefits to their organisations.”

As for the CIO Awards, which were presented in March 2011, the winners were selected by a panel of independent judges from a “Roll of Honour” short list - the CIO 100 2011 Index. The annual CIO 100 index, coordinated by regional enterprise IT magazine CIO Asia, recognises regional enterprises and organisations that have excelled through creative and innovative IT projects in the past 12 months. LTA’s unique adoption of analytics to help in strategic urban transport planning received kudos from the judges.

Besides LTA, this year’s other winners were Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore, and Mahindra Finance, Marico and RedBus in India.

Fairfax Business Media Asia Managing Editor and Editor of CIO Asia magazine, Mr Ross Storey, said the latest CIO Award winners have demonstrated that they have broken new ground by using IT systems, initiatives and projects to provide added value to their customers and organisations. “Our independent judges have selected them because the firms made exemplary use of technology to derive strategic value and maximum returns for their businesses,” he said.