Next Generation Traveler Information System: A Five Year Outlook

CHAPTER 5. OPERATIONS REVIEW

This Operations Review will address internal operational issues for public agencies, including cross-functional data sharing and re-use, build-buy-partner decision-making, and development of an agency-level technology roadmap. As every state and local agency has a unique set of needs in this area and the operational environment continues to evolve quickly, a key emphasis of this chapter is frameworks and best practices that can be applied by specific agencies both to address today's challenges and to actively manage operational decisions over time. It is important to note that these items apply both to existing and new systems: the rapid pace of change requires a regular reassessment of core business and technical assumptions in every case.

Questions considered include:

• What are models of business planning and determining when to phase out current technology/methods?
• What are the issues, processes, and procedures for transitioning to new technology and phasing out/retiring/replacing older technology and system components?
• Some public agencies procure live traffic data from the private sector to supplement existing data collection capabilities. What are the potentials and possibilities of such services to replace existing public agencies' data collection systems (i.e. detectors, loops, etc.)? What are the risks, gains, and losses for agencies?
• How should the sharing of data between states and third parties be handled?
• What are the funding outlook, limitations, and opportunities for traveler information systems for the next five years?

5.1 BUSINESS PLANNING

Public agencies face a variety of important decisions in the NGTIS space. This requires not only initial strategy formulation, but also continuous strategy maintenance in order to ensure that the agency effectively evolves along with the overall traveler information space. This section will review a framework for strategy development and management which can be used to help make key decisions, such as determining the potential roles of state and federal governments in traveler information services in the next five years.

5.1.1 Strategy Management

As a basic framework, strategy management can be organized into five key steps shown in Figure 24:

• Set assumptions for overall system goals. This is a critical but often overlooked part of the strategy process. It is important to determine what the overall system needs to deliver, and how that delivery be measured. The overall goals of the public agency must be clearly articulated. Determining appropriate Key Performance Indicators which will be associated with each goal is an important part of this process.
• Set assumptions for sub-system contribution to goals. Once top-level goals are set, it's time to consider the sub-systems that contribute to those goals. NGTIS is one of these sub-systems. It is critical to decide how NGTIS will contribute to the overall agency goals and how this contribution will be measured. Making these decisions may require significant research into various aspects of the system, from activities at other agencies to technology trends.
• Monitor and regularly assess performance to goals. Quantitatively measuring performance is the most fundamental activity in ongoing strategy management. It is crucial to establish and monitor effective systems which provide the right data at the right time about adherence to goals, performance impacts and trends, etc. These data can also play a key role in communicating with stakeholders.
• Make lifecycle and investment decisions based on results. Armed with quantitative performance information, business planners can then make good decisions about where to focus resources. Are travelers trending away from a specific social media platform and is it time for the agency to follow suit? Are travelers changing their behavior in response to new functionality or data offered by a public agency app?
• Review and re-assess strategy on regular schedule. As external conditions change, it is important to re-confirm that goals at all levels are still generating the optimal results. If not, it may be time to change focus in some areas.

As a simplified example:

• An agency might determine that its primary goal is to optimize transportation network efficiency, and that this goal would be measured by overall throughput of vehicles through the system per day.
• From an NGTIS perspective, this might mean that its goals are to reduce overall vehicle trips per household. The resulting operational focus might then be on providing the best possible information about transit, including highly accurate total trip times and multimodal transfer information. With those decisions in hand, planners could explore the options for delivering on these goals, which might include assessing current and potential transit usage among various traveler segments, integrating traffic and transit data for bus ETA information, providing data feeds to private sector partners for inclusion in information delivery mechanisms used by traveler segments most likely to consider using transit, etc.
• Once these various programs were implemented, overall transit use, change in transit use, and impact on private vehicle use, as well as more detailed metrics like adoption of information delivery mechanisms and use of a specific functionality, might be tracked to determine overall program performance.
• At quarterly and annual reviews of both NGTIS and overall agency strategy, these metrics could then serve as the basis for decision-making about next steps.

This example is over-simplified, but it shows how the interconnected set of goals and measurements allows continuous evolution of the system. It also serves as a valuable tool in communicating decisions and outcomes to both managers and the traveling public.

In addition, the outputs of the strategy management process can provide substantive input to funding discussions by linking investments and results. This is particularly important in light of anecdotal evidence showing that NGTIS systems are often included as part of general operating budgets rather than called out as separate programs.²

5.1.2 Roadmapping

In managing a dynamic system over time, it is easy for the rapid pace of change and the hype around the latest technology to make good decision-making very difficult. Roadmaps can be a valuable tool in this environment. They allow each decision to be placed in a consistent context, and by projecting and aligning trends, can provide helpful insights about when to make changes. An example of a high-level roadmap framework is shown below in Figure 25. This framework would be filled in with specific information corresponding to the various milestones identified as important by a given agency.

On the left-hand side, key tracking areas are determined. In this example, regulatory milestones which will drive specific agency activities (e.g., SAFETEA-LU RTSMIP and MAP-21 Performance Management compliance dates), consumer adoption rates for key technologies such as smartphones and specific social media, assessment points for specific NGTIS solutions (e.g., availability, cost and quality for a new type of data collection solution), and consumer adoption rates for the agency's NGTIS offerings are all tracked. For example, SAFETEA-LU requires collection of certain performance data on metropolitan "Routes of Significance" by November 2016.

Projecting and monitoring these various roadmap elements in visual parallel provides a useful set of perspectives. For example, it might be the case that cost points for data collection infrastructure are not going down fast enough to enable an agency to deploy required solutions in advance of a regulatory milestone, triggering the need to look for alternative data sources and potentially for the agency to change to a new role in the value chain. Or it might become obvious that a certain consumer technology is trending, and causing a corresponding drop in adoption of an existing NGTIS offering and a need to move to a new platform.

5.2 TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION BEST PRACTICES

Managing a dynamic environment with a range of technology lifecycles, including some very rapidly evolving ones, is a challenging discipline. As described in earlier sections, the collection, management, and provision of traveler information requires the practitioner to handle increasingly short technology lifecycles. Rather than measuring the value of deployed technology over decades, new solutions may now only be relevant for a year at a time. The need to interact with a diverse set of consumer platforms adds to this challenge, as multiple standards (or no standards) and rapid change are the order of the day.

Decision and deployment timelines are necessarily compressed in this environment. In order to effectively manage an NGTIS that is responsive to the needs of the consumer and properly enables all related transportation management activities, it is critically important to focus on a combination of business and technology processes. As noted above, these include:

• Setting business goals for systems and subsystems.
• Monitoring metrics designed to support business goal review (performance, cost, etc.).
• Building in system adaptability to enable continuous evolution.

Once clear goals have been set, classic systems engineering discipline can combine with information technology (IT) management to successfully design, deploy and operate systems, as shown previously in Figure 24 on page 48. On the systems engineering side, FHWA's Systems Engineering for Intelligent Transportation Systems is a proven resource. It is designed to provide an introduction to systems engineering and a "basic understanding of how it can be applied to planning, designing, and implementing intelligent transportation systems (ITS) projects." (National ITS Architecture Team , 2007) Section 4.11 provides specific information on handling system replacements. A summary is shown below in Table 6.

Table 6. FHWA Systems Engineering Retirement/Replacement
(National ITS Architecture Team , 2007)

OBJECTIVES	Remove the system from operation, gracefully terminating or transitioning its service. Dispose of the retired system properly.
INPUT Sources of Information	System requirements (retirement/disposal requirements). Service life of the system and components. System performance measures and maintenance records.
PROCESS Key Activities	Plan system retirement. Deactivate system. Remove system. Dispose of system.
OUTPUT Process Results	System retirement plan. Archival documentation.
REVIEW Proceed only if you have:	Planned the system retirement. Documented lessons learned. Disposed of the retired system properly.

On the Information Technology (IT) side, there are also resources which may be of assistance. In particular, the private sector has established formal best practice standards which describe how to best link technology selection, deployment and management to operational needs. One of these is the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), an international service management standard which originated in the United Kingdom (Axelos).

ITIL is a large body of work which cannot be effectively detailed in this report. However, one specific best practice area of specific application to NGTIS (Kempter) should be noted: "The objective of ITIL Service Transition is to build and deploy IT services. Service Transition also makes sure that changes to services and Service Management processes are carried out in a coordinated way." ITIL Service Transition Processes include:

• Transition planning and support.
• Change management.
• Service asset and configuration management.
• Release and deployment management.
• Service validation and testing.
• Change evaluation.
• Knowledge management.

5.3 BUILD/BUY DECISION-MAKING

In most areas of the NGTIS, there is a choice to be made between producing solutions within the agency and outsourcing. From software development to data collection, there are almost always private sector alternatives which can be considered. These decisions, however, are complicated and can have significant long term consequences.

When making decisions about data, there are three key variables to review: cost, quality, and coverage.

• Cost can be viewed in a variety of ways, but needs to be addressed consistently across both internal and external options. For example, a private sector vendor may offer freeway data at a certain cost per centerline mile. The reviewer must develop an understanding of the agency's costs using the exact same metric. This is not always simple, as hardware and software systems may serve multiple uses, but without it, there is no real way to compare costs.
• Similarly, quality must be consistently defined. This may include percentage accuracy to ground truth, percent uptime, standard capture to delivery delay, etc.
• Finally, a clear understanding of coverage allows true comparison of data sets. For example, understand how covered links are defined, and the extent of geographic and road type coverage.

When the outsourced cost is less than performing the work internally, but corresponding quality and coverage has become greater, it is time to seriously consider this alternative for a given type of data. If outsourcing becomes the more attractive option for enough types of data, it is then time to consider whether the agency needs to continue in the data collection business at all.

However, there are other major issues which must also be taken into consideration. The biggest one is availability risk. If an agency becomes dependent on an external source for a given type of data, there is always the possibility that the agency will lose access to that source. It is critical to assess what happens in that situation, which includes developing a very clear understanding of exactly how the data are used throughout the agency, and the impact of not having it. If there are other sources for the data, this risk is somewhat mitigated, although switching processes and costs must also be part of the assessment, as noted in the section titled "Collector" in the previous chapter.

A modified version of this approach can also be used to assess specific technologies. When cost, quality, and functionality of a given solution reach a certain point in comparison with another, it is time to consider switching.

5.4 PARTNERSHIPS

Public-private data sharing is a growing area. Over the next five years, it should be expected that the private sector will continue to innovate both technologies and business models, and will continue to market those offerings to both consumers and the public sector. One example of this activity is shown in Figure 26, Google/Waze is steadily building up global partnerships with specific public sector agencies. (Mgodlew, 2015); (TrafficTechnologyToday, 2015).

The Waze Connected Citizens program is a public/private partnership effort which is designed to facilitate the exchange of information between both sectors. In this program, Waze data reported in real-time by travelers and public sector data are combined and shared. This data includes incidents, construction, congestion and weather. Both parties can then use it for their own purposes. This program has been established in 10 US cities and 12 additional international ones.

As a result, the public sector will have to carefully consider both its own role and the possibilities involved in partnering for solutions in every area of the NGTIS architecture. Where relationships are advantageous, it is worthwhile to give particular consideration to two areas:

• Aligning goals. There are fundamental differences in the way the two types of entities look at traveler information. As noted in the section titled "Business Models" in the previous chapter, from the private sector perspective, data and services are simply items of value to be monetized. All agreements are negotiated on that basis. Public sector entities should be very clear on the roles they wish to play, and the goals that they are seeking to meet, when performing vendor selection assessments and negotiations.
• Setting contracts. As the potential range and complexity of outsourcing arrangements grows, it becomes very important to focus on contract detail. For example, in a data contract, a key consideration might include the exact description of the data available. Data descriptions and terminology should be based on applicable standards where possible. Additional key considerations include the Service Level Agreements, the data transfer standards that are used, and the platforms that are available.

5.5 OPERATIONS CONCLUSIONS

Managing internal operational issues for NGTIS will continue to be a challenge. Traditional approaches to planning for stable, long term solutions do not work well in the face of constant consumer and technology change.

Instead, adaptability is key. Change should be expected, and every aspect of operations should be designed or evolved to provide critical data in support of regular strategic and operational reviews. This approach provides critical perspective required to make the right decisions at the right time so that agencies stay in step with their customers and with network management needs. It also allows public agencies to make good, well-justified decisions quickly, and to communicate those decisions clearly to the public and to partners.

The sections above provide a high level view of frameworks and best practices which can be of assistance as agencies optimize their operational approaches to handle the highly dynamic NGTIS landscape.

² Information shared by NV, TN, UT, and KS DOTs Spring 2015.