HARRISBURG – PennDOT’s modernized field data collection process recently received an international achievement award for its innovative use of geographic information system technology.
The Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award was presented at the Esri International User Conference in San Diego, Calif. The award recognizes vision, leadership, hard work and innovative use of technology.
PennDOT received the award for its use of technology to collect information on local roads and bridges such as location, condition and structure type. The mobile collection method allows better documentation of local roads and bridges in the department’s asset inventory systems.
“We’re very proud to receive this award recognizing our efforts to modernize how we do business,” PennDOT Secretary Barry
J. Schoch said. “By using innovative, mobile technology we can collect data on state and locally owned roads quickly and more efficiently so that we have current information on road and bridge conditions.”
PennDOT and its planning partners incorporated the mobile solution to replace the previous paper-based, time consuming process. The technology allowed the department to have a streamlined process of data collection, data review and data distribution.
With the mobile technology, PennDOT reduced the time to collect information on a single local bridge structure from 20 minutes to six minutes. The software also supported collecting information on more than 30,000 segments of local roads and nearly 3,700 local bridges, replacing paper forms and manual data entry.
“PennDOT is committed to using every taxpayer dollar as efficiently as possible,” Schoch said. “This is just another example of our continuous efforts to enhance our operations.”
For more information about the 2013 Special Achievement in GIS Award winners, including project information and photos, please visit esri.com/sag.
For more information on PennDOT’s modernization initiatives, visit www.ModernDOT.pa.gov.
