Data Integration
The Pennsylvania Experience

Was It Worth It?

Improved management decisions for a major transportation system such as Pennsylvania's cannot be made without a comprehensive and coordinated understanding of the infrastructure assets. Several factors make a department-wide approach to Asset Management and data integration attractive to PENNDOT:

• In Pennsylvania, aging infrastructure assets and growing transportation needs place ever-increasing demands on the limited resources available to maintain an efficient and safe network.
  
• The ability to predict asset needs and asset condition for various funding levels and program policies (i.e., improvement versus preservation versus maintenance) will be essential for strategic and tactical decisions.
  
• Competing needs across asset categories and among customers complicate decisionmaking beyond the point where the simplistic analysis approach of just a few years ago can still ensure good investment strategies for the future.
  
• Development of shorter term plans to accomplish in-place, long-range strategies will help PENNDOT avoid the inefficiencies of a reactive, management-by-crisis approach.
  
• The credibility gained by consistent planning can improve customer and partner buy-in for longer term goals.

If better Asset Management decisions can produce a marginal improvement of only 1 percent in the efficiency of PENNDOT's capital spending (such as achieving similar benefits using less resources), the agency could save more than $28 million annually. More importantly, making poor decisions could have disastrous results in terms of asset performance or in the budgets needed to maintain minimum performance goals.