Performance Measures

Client:  Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) IT 

Background:  A total number of 25,145,000 people use the Texas transportation system of 193,000 miles of roads. TxDOT has a $9 billion a year budget and 12,150 employees.  The IT operation (Technology Services Division) has oversight for the statewide data center services contract and provides photogrammetry services to support statewide land surveying.  IT was identified as a key reorganizational target in the TxDOT Modernization overall effort.

Business Problem:  The new TXDOT CIO knew there were metrics being gathered in various groups of the organization but did not have visibility to those metrics.  In addition to wanting visibility to all of the organizational data, the CIO wanted a consolidated view of the data in a dashboard format.   The task was to design and implement a metrics initiative for the CIO to cover full Performance Measurement for IT.

Approach and Solution:
Our consultants spent time with all stakeholder groups discussing the overall objectives and how to come up with metrics that support the agency's revamped overall vision.  Given the quick turnaround timeline and the large number of groups involved in this effort, the CIO opted to use Microsoft Excel as the delivery mechanism for this effort.  Everyone in the organization has this tool and already uses it in some capacity.  This meant that the effort could be turned around in a matter of several weeks and not several months.  A longer term effort was also established to purchase an online web tool to support metrics gathering and reporting.

The teams have been educated and coached on the measurement processes.  For several months the teams have been following this methodology and producing more and more meaningful data for the CIO.  The team understands the need to continually review and grow the measurement effort.  This concept has provided the CIO and managers clear visibility to team performance and how it feeds into the bigger picture.  This information is now being used to build process improvement efforts across the organization.