Company profile

The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) builds, maintains, and operates the state’s roads, bridges, and tunnels. A 58,000-mile network, it’s the third largest state-maintained highway system in the country. VDOT comprises 9 districts that cover 42 residencies and more than 200 local offices.

Business challenges

VDOT does not control its HRIS system; it’s owned and operated by a different state agency. Because it was difficult to pull most of their necessary ad hoc reports, they needed a better solution. By creatively using an application they already had in place—PeopleFluent’s OrgPublisher® Premier, they found they could gain a deeper visibility into the organization.

VDOT originally selected OrgPublisher to track progress on a major, large-scale mandatory restructuring in 2008. Once successfully completed, VDOT continued using OrgPublisher to manage their state-mandated Maximum Employment Level headcount.

Because OrgPublisher enables VDOT to pull, assemble, and sort workforce data into dynamic, hierarchical organizational charts, from a multitude of systems, they found it to be the solution to their HRIS and reporting situation. Now siloed information is assembled into usable data that can be sliced any way it is needed.

VDOT is now better fulfilling the needs of employees, managers, executives, and the human resource (HR) department. With OrgPublisher, queries can be run, trends spotted, and visual reports printed using the aggregated information. To keep specific information secure, the system knows who is logged on and what is being viewed all times, so only identified populations can see specific information.

Ongoing needs

Today, VDOT publishes 70-plus org charts daily using OrgPublisher, giving various perspectives and spans of control to different populations within the organization. Individuals can look across the entire organization, compare different groups, look at the deepest level, review a high-level summary, or see a detailed view. Links can be embedded for access into other applications. Conditional formatting sets up notification of pending key threshold information.

Org chart examples include an HR-only version, which contains protected information including demographics and salaries. Another is a compensation view where managers can seek salary information on their direct reports and themselves.

There also is an agency-wide VDOT view available to all employees, which contains basic employee information such as job title, manager, role, position, department, headcount, and vacant and filled positions. A contact view contains contact information by employee, such as phone number, photo, email, and department and division information. And a career planning view lets employees proactively check out open positions, requirements, pay ranges, and more for any position at VDOT.

Some additional ways in which VDOT uses OrgPublisher:

• Headcount tracking—Ensures headcount is managed to state-mandated thresholds.
• Reporting—Provides an easy reporting and visualization tool for managers, employees, and HR; with one click - data is downloaded into Excel, a PDF, or PPT.
• Career development—Access to all job-related information across the entire organization including every job opening, links to the applicant tracking system, job descriptions, job competencies, salaries, certification and license requirements, and locations—without HR involvement.
• Certification and licensing—Track who has specific licenses; and who is coming up for relicensing and when.

Benefits from OrgPublisher

VDOT workforce decisions are now data-driven, based on disparate data from siloed systems that is pulled together into usable data in one place. Using available queries, data is searchable with one click—no programming is needed. In fact, the org chart is the second most visited page in the Human Resource Site collection at VDOT behind the Human Resource front page.

How it works

At close of business, VDOT pulls data from some 10 different, siloed sources that don’t “talk to each other”—HRIS, SharePoint lists, a human resource database, active directories, separate databases, the recruiting system, and the learning management system—aggregating it all together in OrgPublisher. Made available the next morning, this data populates some 150 different fields in the org chart, for searching and sorting.

This structure also enables data validation and normalization between systems. So regardless of system age, data sources, or data consistency, the data is meaningful to the user—with no third-party Extract Transfer Load (ETL) participation. And, by running queries between systems that use the same data, inaccuracies can be found and managed.,

Business Results

• Extends usability of HRIS legacy system.
• Leadership gains data-driven workforce decisions.
• Data is dimensional and available to everyone; users can twist, turn, slice, dice, and drill down through it, which cannot be done with a spreadsheet.
• Content is easily manipulated, enabling access at a granular level, while keeping data integrity.