strategy, thought leadership

tech visioning for USDOT

context
The Intelligent Transport Society of America are one of the leading advisors to the US Department of Transportation on how to enact technological transformation. They partnered with us to make progress in national digital infrastructure and AI for transportation.
challenge
Part of the challenge was to ensure that many (100's!) relevant stakeholders, from state-level organizations to safety bodies to industry contractors, have a chance to air their views on this important topic. How do we quickly and effectively ensure that we have the right buy-in to a national strategy?
approach
We used the USDOT 2026 strategy report as our guide. I took the lead on coordinating the prep, facilitation and analysis for a large-scale workshop as the headline input event for national digital strategy, as part of the ITSA annual conference 2023.
when
2023
project type
national-scale strategic advisory
client
ITSA & USDOT

meso-level use cases x macro-level goals

To ensure that we had a clear North star, we pre-defined 10 use cases to help define the input into a national digital infrastructure strategy. These use cases were each linked to one of USDOT's strategic goals: safety, economy, climate and equity.
This formed the basis of our workshop - groups tackled different use cases and we ensured that everyone had sufficient background knowledge by preparing cheat-sheets. We then coached our group facilitators on the topics and discussion points.
In the end, the workshop was successfully carried out with over 200 participants from jurisdictions across the US and neighbouring countries, and the mammoth task of turning all the insights into actionable reports to USDOT commenced.
Having led the workshop components, my role became more scoped to focus on stakeholder mapping and strategic summarization of the workshop outputs. This work became the foundation of a seminal report, the Digital Infrastructure Strategy Report, co-published in 2023 between my own company and ITSA. It formed the key building block for discussion with key USDOT officials as part of future actions on progressing digital infrastrcture and remains a widely-referenced document today. In addition, we extended many of the use cases as part of a follow-on report which focuses on AI in transportation.

Impact

Read the Digital Infrastructure Report
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