VII. OKLAHOMA CASE STUDY:
    Pilot Demonstration to Support Enterprise GIS Development

CONTACT: JAY ADAMS, ASST. PLANNING AND RESEARCH DIVISION MANAGER — OKLAHOMA DOT
(405) 521-2175
jadams@fd9ns01.okladot.state.ok.us

Background

The development and implementation of geospatial technologies at Oklahoma DOT (OKDOT) evolved over many years. Originally, geospatial applications were created to address the specific and individual needs of smaller, discrete projects. However, over time, OKDOT has worked to overcome organizational barriers (such as conceptual gaps in GIS understanding among staff and data silos among divisions) and technological growing pains in order to establish a highly successful enterprise-wide GIS.

OKDOT's enterprise-wide GIS system, the Geographical Resource Intranet Portal (GRIP), allows users to query, view, map, analyze, and report on enterprise transportation data. GRIP provides consistent information quickly, so that more informed decisions can be made about how to improve the quality, safety, and viability of Oklahoma's transportation network. Through the close consideration and quantification of these and other benefits of a robust geospatial program, GIS specialists at ODOT have demonstrated to most Department staff that geospatial technologies can improve their job-performance efficiency as well as the quality of their transportation decisions.

Business Model for Geospatial Technology Implementation

Unlike its counterparts in some state DOT's, OKDOT's Technology Services Division, the division responsible for information technology, does not do much GIS programming. Instead, it manages hands-on hardware tasks, such as server maintenance and workstation support.

GIS activities at OKDOT, including applications development, statewide mapping functions, and historical archives maintenance, are performed within the Planning and Research Division (Figure 7). The Division is also responsible for the development of nearly all transportation GIS data used at OKDOT. In addition, OKDOT manages a tribal boundaries data layer for the 38 federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma and, as mandated in state legislation (Oklahoma Statutes, Title 14, Section 130), a political boundaries layer for the state. Some environmental data layers are provided by other state agencies; for example, the water resources layer is provided by the Oklahoma Water Resources Board.

The Planning and Research Division's GIS activities are supported by FHWA state planning and research (SPR) funds. Annually, the division shapes the initial SPR budget proposal and then submits the plan to the Division's senior management for approval. The budget proposal is then forwarded to FHWA for sign-off.

Due to the Planning and Research Division's responsibility for reporting state highway information to the Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS),¹⁷ this organizational arrangement has helped to promote the growth of GIS activities at OKDOT. As described in the section below, OKDOT's enterprise-wide GIS, which the Planning and Research Division now manages, was developed in response to the need for a way to streamline the reporting of required HPMS data.

Figure 7: Organizational chart for the Planning and Research Division of the Oklahoma Department of Transportation
(adapted from OKDOT's FY2007 State Planning and Research Program, https://www.odot.org/hqdiv/p-r-div/spr-statements/pdfs/spr2007.pdf).

Enterprise GIS and Related Resource Savings

Each year, state highway agencies are required to file reports with FHWA's HPMS. In order to complete the HPMS reporting requirements, many sources of information on a selection of road-inventory attributes for all of a state's roads must be gathered and coalesced. For this reason, reporting in a timely manner can be a difficult undertaking, potentially straining human capital to problematic limits. In 1996, when the Planning and Research Division's current Assistant Planning and Research Division Manager Jay Adams assumed the state's HPMS submittal duties, the Division began to address this issue.

In 1998, the Division suggested, then developed and deployed an enterprise-wide GIS program for HPMS. The Division viewed GIS as a "great integrator" that could automate the entire HPMS workflow by quickly gathering, managing, and submitting the required data. One year later, OKDOT launched a pilot program to test the system's ability to carry out the HPMS tasks and to demonstrate to senior staff how GIS could manage, monitor, report, maintain, and control the HPMS submittal process. For the pilot, one county with a significant urban and rural road network was selected. The Division did a complete digitization of the network. The GIS was then used to extract data from relevant sources (e.g., aerial photographs, boundary files, road classification data, and survey data) and to complete the HPMS submittal. At the end of the process, it was demonstrated that what previously had taken a team of four to six people several months to complete could now be accomplished by one person in roughly two weeks.¹⁸ In addition to winning a Transportation Planning Award from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), GIS won over many within the DOT.

Geographical Resource Intranet Portal (GRIP)
The award-winning piloted enterprise GIS evolved into OKDOT's GRIP, an intranet-only portal used to collect and integrate data from more than eight different databases with 32 map themes into a single Web browser for easy access, analysis, and retrieval. Through GRIP, users can access bridge inventory data; bridge inspection reports; pavement management documentation; needs studies; crashes statistics; information on HPMS, at-grade railroad crossings, right-of-ways, and speed zones; and can inventory programs and projects. All staff working within the OKDOT firewall have access to GRIP, including those at the FHWA Oklahoma Division Office, where a special connection to the OKDOT intranet has been established.

It was originally estimated that GRIP would cost approximately $1.5 million to build. Six years later, on release of the third version of GRIP, the estimate ended up being very close; the expense has been between $1.5 and $2 million. OKDOT, however, did not as accurately predict the return on investment for implementing GRIP; the time and cost savings have far exceeded initial expectations. It had been projected that OKDOT would recover its initial GRIP costs within five years. Instead, the costs were recovered within a few months, due to several factors:

• Information Request Time Savings-Before GRIP, answering and processing public information requests often took OKDOT staff several days; for example, a request for several different kinds of information would mean requests to multiple divisions. With GRIP, OKDOT staff have been able to access these data instantly through any OKDOT computer with an Internet browser, saving countless work hours-not only for those answering the request but also for people in other divisions whose work would previously have been interrupted because they held the requested data.
• Emergency Response-Another area in which GRIP's value has been particularly evident is OKDOT's improved ability to respond to unforeseen transportation problems. For example, on a Sunday in 2002, a barge ran into the Interstate 40 bridge near Webber Falls, causing the bridge to collapse. As part of the response, the state highway patrol called OKDOT and informed it that a detour needed to be established. Since the bridge handled a volume of approximately 20,000 vehicles per day, identifying adequate alternative routes might have been a more daunting challenge without a strong enterprise-wide GIS. However, OKDOT was able to use GRIP to view all bridges in a 50-mile radius of the accident and then review bridge inspection reports. In reading these reports, it became apparent that the bridge offering the shortest alternative route-a bridge that carried 500 cars per day-had a crack and would not be able to support the increased detour volume without repair. With GRIP, OKDOT was immediately able to e-mail directions to the bridge to workers so that the welding necessary for the bridge to handle diverted traffic could be completed.
  Within 2.5 hours, OKDOT had repaired the structural problems and set up the detour. Without GRIP, the effort of manually inspecting the alternative bridges would have taken at least 10 hours. OKDOT estimates that the cost savings generated on that day alone paid for the first two years of the GRIP program.

The Evolution Continues
GRIP has become a model for other states' enterprise GISs,¹⁹ and OKDOT plans on continuing to advance its geospatial activities. In January 2007, the third version of GRIP, which features a graphical user interface based on scalable-vector graphics and allows users to generate reports, was deployed. In efforts to remain "speed-conscious" and to provide state, local, and tribal governments and the public access to some of GRIP's data, OKDOT has worked with a vendor to develop and release GRIPLite,²⁰ a simplified version of GRIP. GRIPLite allows anyone with a computer and Internet access to view various transportation data layers. While it has been live for approximately four months only, the application has been well received, with roughly 1,500 hits per day.

GRIPLite is especially expected to help the state's tribes to complete the often data-intensive requirements of the Indian Reservation Roads Program, a funding program provided by FHWA's Federal Lands Highway Division. Currently, most tribes in Oklahoma do not have sophisticated geospatial technology or data. Instead of tribal members being forced to go into the field to find and collect data manually, OKDOT can quickly provide the data through GRIPLite. In OKDOT's view, there is no reason to reinvent the data collection, access, and management wheel.

GRIPLite will also likely continue to be a valuable tool for quality control and assurance. With a limited number of OKDOT field staff, it is difficult to go into the field and validate all data that are collected and stored for analysis. Since the public has access to transportation data via GRIPLite, people from far corners of the state are able to pinpoint and report inconsistencies and errors, thereby lessening the validation burden on OKDOT staff.

Reference

17. The HPMS is a national-level highway information system that includes data on the extent, condition, performance, use, and operating characteristics of the nation's highways. In general, the HPMS contains administrative and extent-of-system information on all public roads, while information on other characteristics is represented as a mix of universe and sample data for arterial and collector functional systems. For more information, visit https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/hpms.cfm. (back)
18. OKDOT's GIS-enabled HPMS-submittal process presentation is no longer available. (back)
19. Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Delaware are examples of states that have used GRIP as a model for the development of their own enterprise-wide GIS. (back)
20. To view GRIPLite, visit https://www.odot.org/grip-lt/index.htm. (back)