Nevada DOT Leverages Location Analytics with MAGIC Program

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Multi-Application Geographic Information Center (MAGIC) Aims to Drive Better Business Decisions

Owner: Nevada Department of Transportation
Location: Nevada

Challenge

Nevada Department of Transportation’s (NDOT’s) mission is to “provide, operate, and preserve a transportation system that enhances safety, quality of life, and economic development through innovation, environmental stewardship, and a dedicated workforce.” A foundational component to achieve this mission is identifying, visualizing, analyzing, reporting, and maintaining location information — by leveraging a geographic information system (GIS) — from its transportation asset infrastructure and corresponding business data.

NDOT’s existing infrastructure is being enhanced and inspected, new assets are being constructed and inventoried, and legacy transportation features are being retrofitted or retired. All that data must be collected, maintained, analyzed, and reported on to promote a safe and efficient transportation network. However, with the sheer volume of highway data, systems, and requirements, the power of that data is not being realized or leveraged to improve business agility.

Existing information technology (IT) solutions are often siloed and have difficulty organizing data by location using GIS technology, which complicates sharing information between business systems. With existing and upcoming mandated transportation system data reporting requirements, NDOT required an approach to capitalize on its largest asset — its data.

Solution

GeoDecisions is partnering with Arcadis to assist NDOT’s IT office with planning, designing, developing, training, and maintaining projects that support specific business functions across the enterprise. The Multi-Application Geographic Information Center (MAGIC) is a program that will result in project portfolio management that includes:

  • Establishing the IT infrastructure to support an Esri®-based geospatial data warehouse.

  • Integrating existing business systems via web services and extraction-transformation-loading (ETL) processes.

  • Developing new or enhanced spatial applications using GIS data.

  • Establishing business and reporting workflows.

  • Providing in-depth training and a wide range of detailed documentation for agency stakeholders.

Team members are collaborating with IT staff and business data product owners to identify critical datasets, determine which business applications are needed, facilitate the location referencing of transportation datasets, and establish enterprise data governance standards for business applications, data integrations, and core datasets.

 
 

The team is working on various MAGIC Program components simultaneously to maximize the return on investment.

 
 

With the array of business systems, number of agency stakeholders, and need to provide timely solutions, MAGIC uses a disciplined agile methodology, also referred to as disciplined agile delivery (DAD). This agile framework leverages workstream teams to allow multiple closely coordinated projects to be conducted simultaneously, maximizing the value of collective time spent building the portfolio of applications, services, databases, and data processes.

The workstreams consist of specialty areas that provide in-depth knowledge and transportation industry expertise in customer experience, transportation data, application development, and technical services that all coordinate with a performance management team. One of the many tenets of the MAGIC Program is to promote enterprise awareness about solutions that are designed to be sustained with minimal effort while understanding that technology will continue to evolve at an increasing rate.

 
 
A diagram showing the performance management team collects information from each of the specialty areas.

The MAGIC Program workstreams consist of coordinated specialty areas.

 
 

Our approach is to use commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions and apply configurations and minor customizations when and where necessary (COTS+) to best meet NDOT’s business requirements and technology stack.

The solution includes:

  • Documenting and analyzing business requirements based on industry experience.

  • Planning standard operating procedures to optimize flow of rapid and iterative deliverables.

  • Identifying system integration opportunities with definite and sustainable patterns.

  • Developing web, mobile, and desktop applications for business-specific purposes.

  • Establishing cloud infrastructure and an enterprise geospatial data warehouse.

  • Working with staff to develop, implement, and record business processes and data flows.

Key Technologies

  • Esri ArcGIS Enterprise

  • Esri ArcGIS Experience Builder

  • REST web services

  • Microsoft Azure

  • Microsoft DevOps/365/PowerBI

Key Takeaways

  • Leverage location-referenced transportation asset data for specific app development.

  • Integrate geospatial data and web services across systems to utilize enterprise data.

  • Assist NDOT in establishing governance procedures for business processes and data.