During the ITS America State DOT Plenary Session on May 31, various state DOT directors gave brief overviews of what activities their respective agencies were currently involved in and what is to come. Following is a brief overview of what is happening at the Iowa Department of Transportation:

Iowa DOT Director Paul Trombino offered the following update on the agency's activities:

Trombino says big data has been a fairly large focus; particularly data integration and that the agency has been accumulating a great deal of data on freight. 80 million lines of data have currently been collected in the state. He explained that data has affected the traditional planning process within Iowa DOT in that data helps them make better decisions; improve the system and lower overall transportation costs. He said this data has helped connect the operations system—moving seamlessly from one mode to another—from one state into another state. "The future is in information as much as it is in infrastructure," said Trombino and the agency is "focused on infrastructure as well as the data on infrastructure."

Iowa DOT has accumulated 10 plus years of data which now allows previous decisions to be re-evaluated; decisions on traffic safety, weather data, winter data, crash data, vehicle data, driver data, ticket data, etc. are open to new analysis as a result. The data also helps Iowa DOT make cost-effective decisions.

Trombino says the agency is now moving into the development of digital drivers licenses where a license will be on your smartphone as opposed to one being carried in a wallet. The agency's current priority is to collect high quality machine ready data but it does need a standard on how data is collected for consistency across the state(s) and the agency needs to open up the data.