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USDOT Update: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
By Alexandra P. Fox, David Jones, Roger Garren, and Rosalyn Alleman National Transportation Library
Slide 2: The Recovery Act & DOT
- The Recovery Act provided a total of $48.1 billion to be administered by DOT
- "Transportation is the public face of the Recovery Act."Secretary Ray LaHood, in a letter to Governors, April 20, 2009
Slide 3: The Recovery Act (ARRA) Resources
- Recovery.gov
- DOTs Recovery website
- http://www.dot.gov /recovery
Slide 4: Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) Team
- Mission
- Identify and prioritize highway, bridge, transit, rail, aviation and other transportation spending
- Distribute funds to state and local governments quickly
- Monitor the distribution of funds
- Report on standards tracking for financial reporting, measuring performance management, address risk management, and report job creation by program
- Implement guidance issued by Office of Management & Budget (OMB)
Slide 5: Tiger Team
- Logistics Composed of 60+ officials from USDOTs operating administrations and offices at HQ
- Working or stewardship groups created to address functional areas: Financial Assistance Management, Financial Management, IT, Communications, Data Consolidation, Executive Accountability Board, Geographical Information System (GIS) Mapping, Jobs Reporting
- Weekly meetings to report modal administration and working group challenges, milestones, and deliverables
- Co-Chairs submit weekly reports to recovery.gov and brief Secretary LaHood on weekly accomplishments
Slide 6: TIGER Team work in the Context of the NTL/DOT Library Merger
- Staff
- Responsibilities
- Office Space and Equipment
Slide 7: Contact Points at
- Personal
- Phones
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Slide 10: Answering Questions
- FAQs
- Points of contact
Slide 11: Customer Relations Management (CRM) Software
- RightNow Technologies
- SAAS (software as a service) or "hosted" product.
- Software product used to manage communications/questions/answers with your customers
Slide 12: CRM Workflow
- Link from your librarys webpage to web form, FAQs, etc.
- Customer asks question through email or web form
- Agent/librarian logs into the software application, opens question, compiles answer/info for customer, then replies.
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Slide 17: Pros and Cons
- Keeps cost down
- Provides better service to customer and better control to library; Allows for detailed reporting on your activities, types of customers, and branches/divisions served.
- Can login from work or home securely
- FAQ database
- Smart Assist feature
- Learning curve
- Hidden costs depending on your situation
Slide 18: Recovery Act Customers and Questions
Customers: Questions:
- Congressional offices 1. Is my project/organization eligible for ARRA funding?
- State and local governments 2. What type of funding is available, and from which agency?
- Businesses 3. How do we apply for/spend/report on funding?
- Private citizens 4. Submitting required certifications/reports
Slide 19: Recovery Act FAQ Library - Introduction
- Stakeholders looking for answers to urgent questions about ARRA funding, many questions not unique
- NTL had knowledgebase set up already in RightNow
- Modal administrations had FAQs scattered all over
- Right Now Knowledgebase allowed storing and searching all FAQs at the same site
- NTL required to respond to inquiries within 24 hours, needed streamlined processes
Slide 20: Creating FAQs Customers Need
- Created basic FAQ right after ARRA passed, with links to DOT agencies, legislation, states, etc. in response to customer inquiries before TIGER Team initiated program
- Created other FAQs based on mode-specific Q&A; checked for updates regularly
- Created FAQs based on answers to our questions by specialists within DOT
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Slide 24: TIGER Team Reporting - Objectives
- Indicates volume of questions we answer and for which DOT agencies (FHWA, FRA, etc.)
- Shows who our customers are (specific government agencies)
- Shows what the hot issues are for a given week (top FAQs)
- Based on the classifications given to each incident as it is resolved
Slide 25:Recovery Act Reporting: Daily
- Counts total questions answered in last 24 hours
- Report is run in RNT Analytics module, then data transferred to Excel spreadsheet
Slide 26:Recovery Act Reporting: Weekly Reports
- Graph showing weekly totals
- Summary of customer types including list of all federal/state/local governments that contacted us
- Summary of top FAQs on the web site (ranked by usage)
- Top 3 FAQs for the week (# times used by Reference team to answer questions)
- Number of e-mails vs phone calls
- Summary of subjects and number of questions handled for each administration
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1-page report e-mailed to all TIGER Team members across the US DOT
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NTLs Value Proposition- US DOT Reference Service is a "professional solution."Lana Hurdle, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Budget and Programs/Acting CIO & Co-Chair, TIGER Team
- NTLs support "is one of [the
TIGER Team's] unheralded successes. It was up faster than we thought it
would be and the team was ready to answer questions earlier than we thought
they would be.