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By Andy McCue, 21 September 2005 11:30

INTERVIEW It's a little over six months into her role as the Highways Agency's (HA) first ever information director - or the "jam-buster" or "roads tsar" as the tabloids have tagged her - but already Denise Plumpton views the daily drive into her Birmingham office in a completely different light now that she is not simply one of the thousands of drivers trying to beat motorway traffic jams into work.

Instead Plumpton finds herself constantly checking that all the motorway signage is giving out the correct information on queues and delays - and makes sure her colleagues know about it as soon as she gets into work if anything is wrong.

"My team regard me as the customer from hell because if I do spot something on the motorway that is incorrect I'm straight on the phone to them," she laughs.

But she says the biggest single thing about her role that has influenced her own personal driving is a better understanding of why it is important to slow down through roadworks.

"It really does bring home to you why it's so important to drive safely and I must admit now when I see people who ignore the signs and speed through the roadworks when there are obviously people working at the side, I get very angry," she says.

At the same time Plumpton recognises the frustration of many drivers who get annoyed at roadworks speed limits when there appears to be no-one working there and the lack of information about delays and jams, and improving this communication to allow motorists to plan their journeys better and avoid congestion will be a key part of her new role.

"It's primarily about giving our customers information which will influence their travel behaviour," she says.

Part of this is encouraging people to think about planning their journey well before the point where they end up stuck in a jam. The other is providing more accurate information about the length of delays and advice on how best to avoid them.

"People want to know what to do about it. Do I just phone home and say I'm slightly delayed, do I plan to get off at the next exit or do I drive into the next motorway services and have a drink or dinner because I know there's no point in going any further? We need to be able to give people sufficient information about what we believe the expected delay is going to be to their journey so that they can make those judgements," she says.

Wearable computers, voice recognition software for the HA's 1,000 traffic officers, and better message signs are all part of this vision. But Plumpton is particularly excited about the developments being made with in-car technology and believes this will be one of the main delivery channels of this kind of information to motorists in the future.

Satellite navigation systems are now increasingly coming as standard with modestly priced cars, and the systems are advancing from offering just static routes to those that incorporate things such as planned roadworks. Plumpton says this technology will eventually provide personalised real-time journey information and advice while you drive.

"People want relevant personalised services now, and that is where I see the future in delivering information to our customers. If you make a regular journey in a car you might programme that into something and we would deliver you information about that journey. We do work closely with the automotive sector in terms of where they are thinking and where their developments are going and I really think that is a hugely exciting opportunity for us," she says.

It's perhaps not surprising that Plumpton has ended up at the HA given that her big passion is motor racing. Most summer weekends she can be found working as an official starting judge for the British Racing and Sports Car Club, where she claims to be able to judge a close finish to three thousandths of a second with her naked eye.

Plumpton's role at the HA is her first in the public sector - her previous IT director positions include Powergen and mobile phone company Sendo - and she admits the pace and environment are very different.

"It is a more considered, more cautious pace than many private sector areas. Private sector is very much about bottom-line profits, market share, and who your competitors are. It's swapping shareholders for taxpayers. There are similarities in that you've still got to demonstrate that you are delivering benefit. The difference is how you measure the benefit because you are not measuring it on bottom-line profitability in pounds directly," she says.

Evidence of this public sector mindset about caution with taxpayers' money surfaces during our meeting at the HA's headquarters in London, where the request for a pot of fresh coffee was apparently turned down because there was only two of us.

Back to more serious issues, one of Plumpton's concerns about the UK IT industry is the skills gap and the lack of young people opting for a career in IT. She believes the IT industry has, to some extent, created its own problem here by increasingly outsourcing and offshoring the more junior IT roles such as web development and application support.

"We have actually created a gap. You come out of college and the first job available in the UK is senior project manager. How do you make that leap? So I wonder if we've been our own worst enemy. We've gone for the pound on the bottom line today without thinking about how we deal with what potentially is a demographic time bomb," she says.

Plumpton says it is also vital to attract more women into the profession by convincing them it isn't a macho career that just involves "putting on tatty jeans and crawling around under raised floors". She admits that women generally do have to fight harder to climb the ladder but laughs as she suggests they shouldn't be afraid to use it to their advantage.

"I won't name them because it might embarrass them but there are occasions when I have definitely felt I could wind my boss round my little finger because I am a woman. It can be an advantage," she adds.

But right now Plumpton's focus is very much on creating a very real information superhighway that will take the stresses out of motorway driving and help ease congestion.

"The strategy is really thinking much more blue sky about where technology is going and how can we use it both internally to improve the way we do things and also improve the world for our customers - the travellers on our network."