PennDOT Teams Win Pennsylvania Excellence in Technology Awards

In December 2019, teams from Pennsylvania's Infrastructure and Economic Development (IED) Delivery Center — which includes PennDOT — were nominated for three Pennsylvania Excellence in Technology Awards at the Pennsylvania Digital Government Summit.

REAL ID Project

The IED's REAL ID Project Team was nominated for their outstanding project design, development, collaboration, and delivery.  As required by both federal and state legislation, the business and technical team worked closely together to retrofit enhanced identity verification checks into a mature, mainframe-based legacy application known as DL&C. The goals of the REAL ID project were to enhance the integrity and security of state-issued driver licenses and identification cards, intended to aid in fighting terrorism and further mitigate the risk for fraud. 

This 21-month project was carefully coordinated with Homeland Security, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators and the Social Security Administration. The combined accomplishments of these resources resulted in commonwealth residents' ability to obtain a federally recognized REAL ID. Since March 2019, PA has issued approximately 500,000 REAL IDs.

Custom Bidding Solution

Another team from the IED Delivery Center built a custom bidding solution in PennDOT's ECMS application. The new system eliminates all bid rejections due to a faulty software tool, which saves PennDOT more than $5 million annually. Bidders are notified of any potential errors before submission, allowing for correction.

The bidding and subcontracting experience has been streamlined, especially for minority businesses. The bidding rules laid out in Pub 408 are now enforced to ensure only valid bidders can bid. Joint venture bidding capabilities have been enhanced to encourage more bidders to partner, allowing them to bid on larger dollar projects.

The team worked very hard to deliver the project on time and under budget. 

Software Solutions

For more than three years, the IED's Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Team has been assembling processes and tools that automate the building, analysis, and deployment of customized software solutions. The effort has resulted in software development that is better, faster, and cheaper.

The manual tasks of building and deploying software can now be automated and accelerated. Developers can see a quality and security analysis of their code almost immediately, allowing them to implement fixes early in the development process and save expensive rework.

Currently, approximately 200 developers and 130 applications can take advantage of these processes, leading to an estimated cost savings of more than $240,000 per month. In projects using this process from the start, there has been a clear difference in both quality and security.