The Challenge
The Central Government Department, which oversees goods flowing into and out of the country, required an AI-ready platform to deliver digital services faster, more securely and at lower cost. Under the previous model, any new digital service required standing up a new team to build both the service and its foundations from scratch. Multiple teams were confronting the same issue in parallel, leading to different solutions every time. This was slow and expensive, and left an inconsistent digital estate that was challenging to both secure and govern. It also made AI adoption a real problem as AI tools need clean, consistent foundations to function effectively.
Tecknuovo’s Solution
Tecknuovo built a shared cloud platform that launches digital services faster, more securely and at lower cost, while laying the clean, consistent foundations AI tools need to plug into. It’s agile, easy to manage and secure by default, giving teams a ready-made way to build, test and launch new digital applications. Teams now launch new services 77% faster using ready-made, reusable building blocks. And because those blocks can be reused endlessly, the savings multiply with every team that adopts them.
Repeatable, Reusable, AI-Ready Foundations
The platform is standardised and reusable by design: a blueprint for building and launching services, with clear guidance and guardrails for security and governance. Any compatible application can run on it, maintained by a single team supporting everything. This ensures it can be scaled across the Department, and across government, with benefits compounding each time a new application joins.
It also gives the Department a consistent, well-governed base ready for the next wave of AI: assistants for staff, automation of routine tasks and predictive insights drawn across services. And thanks to our Zero Dependency solution, we were able to hand over full documentation and approach, so digital services can be delivered independently in-house.
The Results
- New services launched 77% faster: 10 weeks instead of 10 months
- Automated testing set up 71% faster: 4 weeks instead of 14
- An estimated £2.25m saved per team onboarded
- Cloud spending cut by 70%
Four Critical National Infrastructure applications, all involved in monitoring goods crossing UK borders, have moved onto the platform: a cross-border goods system, a duty-suspended goods tracking system, a trader checking system and an automated payments service. All four now sit on a modern, joined-up foundation, exactly the setup that makes future AI capabilities like fraud detection, risk scoring and intelligent automation far easier to introduce.
Spotlight: the cross-border goods system
Running since 2003, this critical system lets traders move goods through UK borders under international arrangements, deferring import paperwork and duties until goods reach their destination. Updates previously took months. Using the new platform’s ready-approved tools, processes and guardrails, the department’s in-house team, supported by Tecknuovo, built and launched the latest version quickly and securely. It’s now live, with future updates set to be faster and lower-risk. And because it sits on a modern, well-governed digital foundation, the Central Government Department is far better placed to layer in AI: spotting unusual patterns in trade data, predicting border bottlenecks, or automating routine checks.
