Powerful forces combine to create our highway infrastructure: muscles and manpower, hydraulics and horsepower, and lots of seasoned brainpower. At the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), we've added another tool to the mix – cyber-power.

In 2003, the Oregon Legislature allocated $1.3 billion for the OTIA III State Bridge Delivery Program, directing ODOT to repair or replace hundreds of aging bridges statewide. The legislature set a 10-year time frame for the work.

The scope of such a large project in a relatively tight turnaround meant we had to maximize every tool at our disposal. Merely permitting the bridges for environmental considerations in the traditional way – subject to the standards of 11 regulatory agencies – would have taken 75 years, longer than the expected life of the bridges themselves.

We decided to implement nine information technology (IT) systems, anticipating that they would improve work flow and coordination; reduce cost; and make timely, accurate information available to everybody on the team, internally and externally. The rule of thumb in determining whether to invest in IT infrastructure is to calculate development costs versus projected life cycle benefits; but in this case, we had to develop the systems and discover later whether they had paid off.

Last year, ODOT evaluated the benefits and costs of each system to determine whether the investments had been worthwhile. We discovered that the nine IT tools had a combined benefit-cost ratio of 2.1 to 1. That is, for every $1 invested, the systems returned $2.10 in benefits. Most of the measurable benefits were time savings of people working on the bridge program, which equaled an estimated 7.9 full-time positions over the 10-year program timeline. For investment costs of $3.5 million in staff development time, in terms of costs avoided, the bridge program saved an estimated $7.3 million.

The tools saved time in three main ways:

• Work flowed more efficiently as staff spent less time entering data or performing calculations.
• Staff could easily retrieve data to create reports, maps, and drawings.
• Web interfaces made information available from remote as well as central locations.

For a large project such as ours, the IT tools provided the transparency, accountability, and archival documentation essential to public-sector projects. At the heart of the system is the GIS infrastructure. It includes the hardware and software to create and support other IT activities, to generate maps, and to provide a research tool for environmental, design, and programmatic issues; its benefit-cost ratio was 3.0. Two other applications were also invaluable. The Electronic Document Management System manages and stores files, and achieved a benefit-cost ratio of 6.1. The Pre-Construction Assessment tool provides an automated form subcontractors can use to complete applications associated with the programmatic environmental permit; its benefit-cost ratio was 7.7.

But any highway construction project, large or small, could benefit from a Work Zone Traffic Analysis (WZTA) tool such as the one we developed. The WZTA system began as an Excel spreadsheet that allowed engineers to make calculations for lane closures and delay estimates. They could use the reports it produced to determine how to stage a project and when to schedule lane closures. The system was used for projects in construction, utility work, surveying, and routine maintenance operations.

The spreadsheet had limitations, however, so ODOT, mobility engineers, computer programmers, and GIS staff working on the bridge program devised a custom Web-based and GIS-enabled version of the tool. The new version allows certified ODOT personnel throughout Oregon to update and modify the data continually. Analysis that once took a few hours to complete can now be done in as little as 15 minutes.

The WZTA system was implemented in 2009, near the end of the design phase, so it had limited use on the bridge program; as a result, its benefit-to-cost ratio was only 0.7. Taking into account its use by the rest of ODOT, however, the benefit-to-cost ratio agency wide came in at 3.6.

Another long-term success story was the Bridge Reporting System (BRS), which provides a database of relevant program and project information, updated monthly; its benefit-cost ratio was 1.5. As a state agency, we were able to find other uses for the BRS, including tracking Oregon's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and 2009 Oregon Jobs and Transportation Act allocations.

Our advice to other groups looking to benefit from their investments in IT systems is to implement as early as possible and – because the greatest savings are calculated in staff time, which is required for application development, too – consider whether potential savings justify development of an application.

Jim Cox is assistant branch manager for the Oregon Department of Transportation's Major Projects Branch.