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Georgia Department of Transportation

GDOT logo"One of the main benefits of business intelligence (BI) is that people are more aware that the information they're looking at is accurate and up-to-date—so they can make decisions with confidence."

Doug Chambers, administrator, office of IT applications,
Georgia Department of Transportation

Challenge

Charged with the mission of delivering safe, seamless, and sustainable transportation systems for the citizens of the state of Georgia, the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) manages several thousand projects each year. With thousands of projects in progress—ranging from putting in a sidewalk or a beautification project in a small town, all the way up to multimillion-dollar projects, such as building bridges or expressways—GDOT needs timely access to information, and the capability to report on each project quickly and accurately.

"These projects go through different phases—like preengineering, acquiring right of way, design—and it takes several years to get a project through those different stages," says Doug Chambers, administrator, office of IT applications at GDOT. "We needed to have better visibility of where the projects were, and what processes were affecting the delivery date." Compounding the tracking and reporting challenges were GDOT's multiple disparate databases—the result of years of a decentralized IT department. "The offices would go out and have an application developed to meet their needs," explains Chambers. "They didn't necessarily coordinate with the other offices to see how their application would affect others."

Along with monitoring project activities, GDOT was challenged to oversee extensive budgets, including managing financial and cash flow forecasting for billions of dollars in state programs—yet accessing financial data was time-consuming and cumbersome. "Our main financial software was PeopleSoft," says Chambers, "and that was all handled through the state accounting office. This made it difficult for us to access our data directly. Instead, we had to get weekly data extracts. And that took months of negotiations to establish the extracts, literally."

Approach

GDOT looked to Business Objects Global Services to help implement a full suite of Business Objects business intelligence (BI) solutions, including BusinessObjects™ XI Release 2, BusinessObjects Performance Manager, BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager, BusinessObjects Data Integrator XI, and BusinessObjects Web Intelligence®. The Global Services team helped GDOT define data flows for performance management, build a data warehouse composed of several million records, and initiate streamlined tracking and reporting capabilities. "We use BusinessObjects Data Integrator to pull information over each night to update our information," says Chambers, "and from this we produce approximately 700 different reports for management. We also use the information to populate the dashboards for our performance management applications."

Dashboards give managers immediate insight to activities occurring within their area of responsibility. Pulling data from disparate sources into universes also gives GDOT accurate and up-to-date information, enabling executive management to make informed decisions. Chambers says, "We have a lot of disparate databases throughout the department. Using Data Integrator, we can combine those into useful universes for our users." GDOT currently accesses more than 30 universes.

Chambers highly recommends using Business Objects Global Services to guide the implementation effort. "To effectively utilize a BI system, you need someone with expertise to help you get it set up, right from the get-go," says Chambers. "Global Services worked with us for about six or seven months, and they helped mentor our folks to get them up to speed, so it was a very smooth transition when they left. I would not have felt comfortable at all without Global Services working with us."

Results

BusinessObjects XI Release 2 broadens GDOT's use of BI and will eventually be released to partners as well as internal end-users. BI tools are already available to a range of end-users within GDOT. With an initial rollout to 200 users (primarily upper management and executives), GDOT will deploy to more than 2,000 additional users in January 2007, including supervisors and operational personnel. Chambers views his organization's wide adoption of BI as advantageous, noting, "One of the main benefits of BI is that people are more aware that the information they're looking at is accurate and up-to-date—so they can make decisions with confidence." Another benefit is that BI makes people more aware of what and how they're contributing to the company's goals.

Chambers praises the ability of BI to track projects through multiple phases, to make sure GDOT gets projects delivered on time, and to identify any problems before they become too serious. He notes that, in several situations, GDOT identified problems before they became critical, thus avoiding project delays.

Using BusinessObjects Data Integrator XI, GDOT is now able to access external financial data quickly. Transferring PeopleSoft financial data into a data warehouse, Data Integrator enables GDOT employees to directly query the information. Chambers notes, "BI brings our company closer together.

BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager introduced a new paradigm for executive management. "They're much more aware of what's going on within the department now," says Chambers. Dashboards show the status of projects at a glance, and enable executives to drill down to data that explains the big picture.

"Business Objects Global Services worked with us in all areas—they've been a tremendous help," says Chambers. "It was essential that we had someone of their caliber to help us migrate our data—it certainly paid off in the long run."

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