SPR-795

Description:

ADOT’s Financial Management Services’ (FMS) Resource Administration (RA) team uses a Microsoft© AccessTM database (informally referred to as the “RA Database”) to track a portfolio of over $1 billion a year of federally funded projects for ADOT, local public agencies, and statewide public-private partnerships. This database is used to track current and future projects’ lifecycles, histories, funding, allocations, apportionments, obligations, etc. Multiple groups across ADOT use this database to produce mission-critical reports used to track federal aid received by councils of governments (COGs) and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) as well as to track and monitor federal aid sub-allocated to local governments. Each year, FMS and the Information Technology Group (ITG) work to address various problems with the RA database, such as the database becoming unresponsive, users losing access to it, and updating it to be compatible with newer versions of MS OfficeTM. With each of these issues comes the risk of data loss in a mission-critical database. ITG currently has a project in place to migrate the database to an ITG-managed SQL server as a stop-gap approach. However, in order to find a permanent solution, FMS would like to investigate how other state departments of transportation are managing their own similar databases and to identify best practices for technology, policies, and staffing. 

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