Culture needs to change with technology

During my ten-year position as Chief IT Manager at the Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT), I encountered several challenges that highlighted the need for culture to evolve with technology. One such instance plagued the NDOT’s freeway expansion project. One of their deputy directors jokingly remarked, “If I asked four different people at NDOT how much it cost to build a section of freeway, I’d get four different answers.

This wasn’t due to poor data, uncaring employees, or ineffective systems but more because of the NDOT’s various siloed systems and how individual groups tracked their data. I’ve never worked with a more caring, passionate, and committed team than I did at NDOT. They truly care about delivering a great program. However, the systems in place were inadequate and made reporting data across those systems almost impossible. There were more than just data and system silos; there were team and workflow silos as well.

To break these silos down and work toward a Single Source of Truth (SSOT), we needed to build a more collaborative, data-centric culture. Addressing this cultural divide to get to an SSOT was an immense and new challenge for the IT team. For NDOT to make better data-driven decisions, getting to an SSOT was necessary. We felt that technology could get us there. But our culture would have to change to accomplish this.

Creating that SSOT takes time, coordination, and cooperation between divisions within the department. It forces you to examine your data and processes, then agree on and document workflows. This was a challenge during my time at NDOT. Today, many DOTs rely on institutional knowledge held by well-tenured employees. Everyone turns to these senior-level team members for process details because little is available by way of documentation, meaning that institutional knowledge rapidly depletes as they retire. Therefore, we must document, agree upon, and standardize processes as team members leave to avoid loss of institutional knowledge. We can introduce IT solutions to automate these processes but achieving this requires an underlying cultural change and support from all department levels.

A cultural change is essential before adopting fast-moving digital technologies such as clouds, analytics, artificial intelligence, and robotics. 

Nothing delivers higher ROI from digital investments than building a culture that encourages usage and unlocks target outcomes and ROI. Everyone, from the top executive to the front-line worker, must be made digital-ready by ensuring they buy into the idea. This takes time but eventually shows value by saving resources and increasing efficiency.

When I started at the DOT, a colleague told me that everyone at NDOT is a unicorn. It took a while to understand what she meant, but I soon realized there was some truth to her statement. The divisions that comprise a DOT are diverse, and on the surface, they seem unique and work mostly independently of each other. There are teams that are responsible for everything from plowing snow in the winter to planning for future infrastructure needs, designing and testing construction materials, and devising transportation infrastructure. These teams are specialized and seemingly independent of others. They are accustomed to working in their silos. However, once you dig in a little deeper, you can see the relationships between the teams and the need for data to flow between them.

When we implemented one of our first large enterprise products, we quickly realized that the teams were extremely protective of their siloed data and hesitant to expose it to other teams throughout the organization. The concerns relayed to IT ranged from data errors to people not understanding their data. In a cloud-based collaborative environment where everyone has access to the same data, each team member can identify mistakes, fix them, and, eventually, ensure the data improves and becomes more reliable.

There are others areas where cultural change is needed to transform the DOT. DOTs, for example, are very project oriented. We build and maintain roads, bridges, and a multitude of other transportation infrastructure. These projects have a start date and a completion date, after which we move on to the next project. The mindset is the same when IT collaborates with a business unit implementing a new system. As we transition to large, highly configured, cloud-hosted systems that multiple business units within the agency use, we must change that mindset and adopt a new project management approach rather than a traditional one. A product management approach allows the agency flexibility to grow and make incremental changes to the product as business needs change or require enhancements without undertaking large IT projects or modifying source code for homegrown systems.

Adapting to this product management approach has had its challenges. The business units we support must trust these products, which we will use for years and will change as our business needs evolve.

An example of how a product management approach can be a benefit and speed up delivery of system changes was in 2021. A statutory change required us to score out-of-state vendors bidding on NDOT projects using a new approach. We needed to replace the system used to score proposals, but we no longer had developers familiar with the old source code. They had left (taking institutional knowledge with them), the source code was questionable, and I was given a 12-month timeline to make that one change. The business opted to track this legislative requirement in a spreadsheet rather than wait for us to change the legacy application. It is possible to make, test, and implement those alterations in two weeks with a highly configurable solution such as Masterworks.

Culture is a difficult-to-manage component of technological transformation, especially when large enterprise-wide solutions are deployed. These platforms require data ownership and governance culture. We need data owners to step up and say, “This is my data. I am responsible for it.” The owner can identify gaps in data and work with IT and other stakeholders to fill the void. As a result, the data remains current and useful. It brings the proper controls in place for access and usage, ensuring quality and reliability. Above all, it simplifies the process of creating and maintaining an SSOT.

Much of a DOT’s data is tied to a linear referencing system – route and milepost. When I started at the DOT ten years ago, we had at least three different linear referencing systems, which made tying data across multiple platforms and performing any kind of analysis extremely difficult. Moving to an SSOT solves this problem, and fortunately, we now have one linear referencing system and someone who owns and manages the department’s data.

Investing in digital technology can be a complex and costly undertaking that has enormous potential to improve an agency’s productivity and efficiency. Only when we combine technology with the right culture can these benefits be fully realized.