During the ITS America Annual Meeting, Ryan Rice, ‎Director, Division of Transportation Systems Management & Operations with the Colorado DOT (CDOT) presented on "Changing the DOT Culture."

Prior to TSM&O recognition, Rice said that the CDOT culture had many major ITS accomplishment but its focus was on large projects, i.e., capacity first, not TSM&O; and there was a lack of data- driven decisions. Rice said CDOT needed to use data to evaluate project needs and it needed to make operational strategy decisions.

Rice said once CDOT incorporated TSM&O recognition, it developed the following major initiatives and game changers:

*Operations Clearance process on all CDOT projects;
*Developed a performance measures report;
*Developed a statewide TSM&O plan;
*Incorporated TSM&O implementation into its planning process;
*Began planning for Connected Vehicles;
*Implementation of performance measures;
*and the acquisition of big data

Rice said embracing TSM&O has caused big changes about what operations is to the agency and the department is now embracing TSM&O. He said the forementioned initiatives are helping change the culture of CDOT and that the biggest lesson learned is that setting performance measures is critical. Please visit the Colorado Department of Transportation to find out more.