Guidance for Development and Management of Sustainable Enterprise Information Portals (2018)

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7 Introduction State departments of transportation (DOTs) produce, use, store, and share a variety of data to make decisions about development, operation, and upkeep of the systems and services for which they are responsible. DOT personnel, contractors and consultants, local public agencies, media, and the traveling public seek access to DOT information for a variety of purposes. Open government initiatives, the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of work within agencies, greater collaboration with external partners, growing demands for transparency in government agency operations, as well as the growing complexity, size, and sources of data to be managed are driving increases in demand for access to DOT information. The emergence and maturity of the Internet has revolutionized how all people access, store, share, and manage information. This emergence also offers leaps in transparency, responsiveness, efficiency, and customization of services for DOT information users. Virtually any resource can be made available via a web interface. This breadth of information challenges even the most robust content management systems and strategies. Despite lagging for many years, public agencies now recognize the power of robust information architectures and are seeking to ensure that the infor- mation they provide remains accessible, timely, and relevant while ensuring security and privacy. The growing investment by public agencies clearly demonstrates how even the smallest municipal government can adopt a suite of web-based tools with invaluable services such as reporting pave- ment potholes or accessing potable water utility bills online. An enterprise information portal (EIP) is a framework for offering and integrating information through a web-based user interface using a unified access point. As agencies develop EIPs for their internal and external customers, business partners, and contractors, they must consider efficient design and management policies along with performance and access benchmarks. Within an agency, the information technology (IT) department is often tasked with working across numer- ous divisions to ensure that the specific information needs of each division are being met. An IT planning and design division, for example, will develop a portal entirely devoted to contract administration and another portal for the traffic division. The needs of a contracts portal may include specialized authentication procedures, a two-way flow of information, submissions of contract documents or proposals, and retrieval of contract plans for reviews or bidding. The traffic division portal, or group of portals, will offer interfaces with external clients for the dis- semination of information and interfaces with internal clients for collecting and processing data, particularly if data collection facilities are in a separate administrative unit. In both cases, while the IT division can help design and maintain portals and support access performance, it is the responsibility of the respective divisions to ensure the quality of information and data. Many DOTs have implemented one or more EIPs, often using commercially available portal frameworks to simplify the complexity of their task and are now faced with the need to evolve these portals or create new ones to meet new and future portal users’ demands for information S E C T I O N 1

8 Guidance for Development and Management of Sustainable Enterprise Information Portals generated by GIS and mobile and connected vehicle1 technologies. Unfortunately, these new and future demands for information often exceed the scope and budget of current DOT EIPs and associated technologies, which were not designed to handle rapidly changing requirements. DOTs are now confronted with the need to design their EIPs to be adaptable and responsive to rapid changes, so as not to acquire or redesign portals following each change. Sustainability is the ability of the enterprise to meet its present needs without compromising its ability to meet future needs. IT systems’ sustainability is often discussed in the context of funding resources; in this guidance, DOT EIPs’ sustainability will be discussed as a far broader concept that spans technologies, policies, procedures, approaches, and decisions that support the quality and effec- tiveness of services currently offered while proactively and efficiently accommodating future growth through flexibility, scalability, and replaceability. Ultimately, the success and costs of EIPs center on establishing an architecture and perfor- mance goals that can easily accommodate any client-side needs, user needs, short-term and long- term growth, and the unforeseen evolution of the EIP. The requirements for such an architecture can be derived and optimized by carefully studying how similar challenges are being addressed by agencies and companies across other industries. The practical applications of “big data” and agencies’ growing interactions with the private sector, present opportunities for synergies that could significantly reduce any agency’s investment needs in data collection and storage, while also informing the development of EIPs as flexible, secure, and useful tools. This guidance document offers insights and smart practices to enhance agency personnel’s understanding of the value, uses, design, and maintenance of EIPs as well as the design principles, management practices, and performance characteristics that will ensure that a DOT’s EIPs effec- tively and sustainably serve its users and the agency’s mission. Specifically, this guidance covers • Typical portal uses and users for DOT agency information. • Architectures and system design principles for portal structure and web access including typical relationships between DOT portals and portals managed by others. • Governance for sustainable portal management including portal-management responsibilities. Discussed are systems performance measures such as scalability, data acceptance, and applica- tion acceptance and integration as well as customer-oriented performance measures. This guidance will support state DOTs in making the shift from traditional integrated portal approaches to loosely connected and adaptable information portals. 1.1 Who Should Use This Guidance This guidance is intended for three key audience groups: • Agency business-management personnel to help them understand the issues to be addressed when making information available about the state’s transportation system and agency opera- tions both within and outside the agency. • Agency IT managers to help them develop strategies for evolving existing EIPs and creating new ones to effectively and sustainably deliver information of value to users. • Technical staff within specific DOT divisions to help them understand options available when addressing data and information-sharing needs within their division, within the broader agency, and across external clients. Each audience will benefit from the content offered within the main body of this guidance document. Information technology managers and, to some extent, technical staff may find the 1https://www.its.dot.gov/cv_basics/index.htm

Introduction 9 list of requirements for sustainable DOT EIPs in Section 5.1 useful as well as the diagrams developed in this research. Some of these diagrams are presented in Section 5; all the diagrams are included in the contractor’s final report for NCHRP Project 20-103 (available at www.trb.org by searching on NCHRP Web-Only Document 241). The diagrams are also posted online in Microsoft Visio format (available at www.trb.org by searching on NCHRP Research Report 865). 1.2 Document Organization The information in this guidance is offered from a high-level management perspective as well as at a level of technical detail that will benefit practitioners or a more technically focused audience that is planning for or implementing a sustainable EIP. This document is organized as follows: • Section 2 summarizes the roles EIPs perform for state DOTs, focusing on services, users, and uses of information. • Section 3 shares current industry practices in developing and maintaining sustainable EIPs, including data storage and management, content management, and governance practices with a focus on leveraging cloud services to reduce the risk of infrastructure obsolescence. • Section 4 introduces the concept of microservices architecture patterns, termed micro- services, as the new direction in architecting EIPs to achieve long-term sustainability by implementing modular design. • Section 5 is specifically targeted for a more technically focused audience, addressing topics of design requirements and technology recommendations to build and migrate EIPs to a micro- services architecture. • Section 6 presents three case studies showing early adoption of modern DOT EIP practices and technologies by the Utah, Texas, and Virginia DOTs. • Section 7 offers recommendations on how to promote adoption of practices for sus- tainable EIPs through a focus on workforce development, flexible governance practices, knowledge sharing, and overcoming of legal complexities. • Section 8 offers strategies for demonstrating the value of EIPs through championing, messag- ing, performance tracking, and sharing lessons learned and success stories. This guidance offers a glossary of terms as well as additional information specific to the EIP service architecture. A PowerPoint presentation, “Development and Management of Sustain- able Information Portals: Guidance for Transportation Agencies,” is included in the appendix to this document and is also provided online. The PowerPoint presentation can be accessed electronically by going to www.trb.org and searching on NCHRP Research Report 865. Use case diagrams developed for the NCHRP Project 20-103 research can also be found (in their native format—Microsoft Visio) on www.trb.org by searching on NCHRP Research Report 865. The contractor’s final report for NCHRP Project 20-103, providing a detailed account of the research conducted, is available on www.trb.org as NCHRP Web-Only Document 241: Develop- ment and Management of Sustainable Enterprise Information Portals. Finally, the research team envisioned this guide itself as an example of a portal and produced a web-based version of this guidance, with the idea that an agency or operating unit might use the files as a template that could be tailored to serve the agency’s specific interests (the web-based version of the guide was not edited by TRB). These files are available for download on the NCHRP Project 20-103 web page (the files will need to be put on a server): https://apps.trb.org/cmsfeed/ TRBNetProjectDisplay.asp?ProjectID=3882.