New York state's approach to asset management: A case study

The New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) has undertaken an effort to design and implement an asset management system for overseeing the state's diverse and complex transportation system. The department has built an appropriate organizational and business foundation for the effective use of sound, integrated databases and technical modeling tools. For more than a decade, well before asset management attracted interest from the transportation community, NYSDOT has advanced this concept on four fronts: developing well-defined organizational roles within a highly decentralized department; designing and implementing a formal and disciplined core business procedure (the program update process) to cover both program development and performance monitoring; developing key transportation management systems (pavement, bridge, congestion and mobility, and public transportation), even without a federal mandate; and designing and implementing a state-of-the-art automated program and project management system that serves, in part, to integrate the department's use of the individual management systems and maintains all essential data for developing and managing the program. New York's experience strongly suggests that despite the difficulty and time required to carry out the key processes, these four elements represent the heart of an asset management system. When identifying and developing additional technical elements, state departments of transportation should heed the importance of building and maintaining an effective organizational and business foundation.