Vehicle Safety: Enhanced Project Management of New Information Technology Could Help Improve NHTSA's Oversight of Safety Defects
Highlights
What GAO Found
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) faces several challenges in its oversight of vehicle safety defects and has initiated or proposed some actions to address them. Challenges include improving data collection and analysis, providing adequate guidance and standard business processes to the staff who identify and investigate potential vehicle defects, and keeping pace with new technologies. A key step NHTSA is taking to address some of these challenges is implementing a new information technology (IT) system—the Corporate Information Factory (CIF)—to enhance data mining and case management for identifying and investigating potential safety defects. According to NHTSA, some of its proposed actions could require additional resources. Congress has indicated that additional resources would depend on NHTSA's improving how it manages investigating defects.
NHTSA's implementation of its new IT system reflects some recognized project-management practices, like developing plans for managing system requirements and risks, but the agency could better manage the CIF in two areas.
- Integrated management : The Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) and Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) have distinct responsibilities for implementing the CIF—the base infrastructure and ODI customizations, respectively. However, the offices have not integrated their CIF project plans as recommended by recognized practices for project management. Integration could benefit both offices—ODI by helping ensure that CIF customizations meet staff needs and are incorporated into their daily work, and OCIO by being able to apply lessons from ODI's customizations to other offices that will be customizing and using the CIF.
- Project schedule: While ODI recently created a schedule for an initial set of CIF customizations, it lacks an overall schedule for customizing and releasing CIF software applications. ODI officials said they do not have an overall schedule because they view customization as an ongoing process; that is, as staff understand and learn to better use the CIF, ODI will identify additional customizations. Given the complexity of implementing the CIF, as well as other changes occurring in ODI to address the challenges discussed above, an overall schedule that sequences work and includes milestones would help ODI manage and prioritize already identified customizations, as well as those that may be identified in the future.
NHTSA has taken steps to address new technologies in its oversight of vehicle safety, and its strategic-planning efforts are ongoing. Among these steps, in 2012 NHTSA completed internal roadmaps for research on vehicle electronics, and in 2015 NHTSA created the Vehicle Innovation Team, which aims to identify regulatory and other challenges to increasing vehicle automation. In 2012, a Transportation Research Board study recommended that NHTSA issue a strategic plan to guide key policy decisions related to the scope and direction of the agency's vehicle safety programs, including oversight of new technologies. NHTSA officials told GAO they recently restarted their strategic-planning effort and plan to release a strategic plan for the agency in spring 2016. This plan will be critical for NHTSA in prioritizing and coordinating its initiatives.
Why GAO Did This Study
NHTSA's mission is to save lives, prevent injuries, and reduce the economic costs due to traffic crashes. As such, NHTSA is responsible for overseeing vehicle safety, a task made more challenging by the increasingly complex electronics and software used in today's vehicles. NHTSA's oversight faces greater scrutiny after a series of high-profile vehicle recalls that highlighted deficiencies with NHTSA's safety-defect investigation processes.
GAO was asked to examine NHTSA's oversight of safety defects and new automotive technologies. This report addresses: (1) challenges identified for NHTSA's oversight of safety defects, (2) NHTSA's implementation of a new IT system for safety-defect investigations, and (3) how NHTSA is addressing new technologies in its oversight of vehicle safety, among other things. GAO reviewed reports on NHTSA's safety-defect process since 2005, such as reports by the Department of Transportation (DOT) Inspector General and literature from scholarly journals, as well as NHTSA budget requests, reports, and priority plans; compared NHTSA's project-management documents for the CIF system to DOT guidance and other recognized practices for project management; and interviewed NHTSA officials and industry stakeholders.
Recommendations
GAO recommends that NHTSA develop an integrated project-management approach for the CIF as well as an overall schedule to customize the CIF applications for ODI. DOT concurred with the recommendations.
Recommendations for Executive Action
| Agency Affected | Recommendation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Department of Transportation | To facilitate NHTSA's implementation of a new IT system within ODI as well as other program offices and to help ensure that the system's capabilities are available for staff to use in a timely manner, the Secretary of Transportation should direct the Administrator of NHTSA to develop a schedule for customizing CIF tools for ODI, to include milestones for releasing the CIF tools for ODI staff to use and developing training for staff on the CIF tools, as well as prioritizing and sequencing the customization work to be done. | In 2016, we reported that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) faces several challenges in its oversight of vehicle safety defects and has initiated or proposed some actions to address them. One key action that NHTSA is taking to improve its oversight is implementing a new information technology (IT) system--the Corporate Information Factory (CIF)--to enhance NHTSA's data mining and case management for identifying and investigating potential safety defects. However, before it can be fully deployed, the Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) must customize the CIF tools to fit its needs and business processes. ODI had created a schedule for completing an initial set... of customizations but had no overall project schedule for carrying out additional tool customizations and training ODI staff to take advantage of the new capabilities provided by the tools. ODI also lacked an overall schedule that sequenced work and included milestones that could help ODI manage and prioritize already identified customizations, as well as those that may be identified in the future. Therefore, we recommended that NHTSA develop a schedule for customizing CIF tools for ODI, to include milestones for releasing the CIF tools for ODI staff to use and developing training for staff on the CIF tools, as well as prioritizing and sequencing the customization work to be done. In 2016, we confirmed that NHTSA created the Office of Information Management within its Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) to manage the CIF and all CIF customizations for program offices including ODI. With the transfer of managing CIF customizations from ODI to this new office, OCIO incorporated ODI customizations into OCIO's master CIF project schedule and established a process to manage and prioritize ODI customizations. The master CIF project schedule includes milestones for releasing ODI customizations as well as developing and conducting training for ODI staff. To prioritize and sequence ODI customizations, NHTSA created a process for ODI and OCIO to meet weekly to review and prioritize desired customizations, which are added to the master CIF project schedule. As a result, NHTSA and ODI will be better able to track its progress and establish next steps for CIF customizations, as well as help ensure that ODI makes timely progress toward incorporating the CIF tools into staff's day-to-day activities and that ODI staff are trained to use the new CIF tools in their work.
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| Department of Transportation | To facilitate NHTSA's implementation of a new IT system within ODI as well as other program offices and to help ensure that the system's capabilities are available for staff to use in a timely manner, the Secretary of Transportation should direct the Administrator of NHTSA to establish an integrated management approach for implementing the CIF capabilities that (1) establishes clear lines of authority and roles and responsibilities among the program offices and the OCIO and (2) outlines how offices will coordinate project-management practices, such as managing risks and measuring performance, for the CIF. | In 2016, we reported that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) faces several challenges in its oversight of vehicle safety defects and has initiated or proposed some actions to address them. A key step NHTSA is taking to address some of these challenges is implementing a new information technology (IT) system-the Corporate Information Factory (CIF)-to enhance data mining and case management for identifying and investigating potential safety defects. NHTSA's implementation of the CIF system reflects some recognized project-management practices, but one area the agency could better manage the CIF was integrated management. The Office of the Chief Information Officer...
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