The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : CASE STUDY: How technology changed a workplace : Seattle’s Metro System Enters Fast Lane with Electronic Office

Jay Costa points to a corner of his cubicle. “I used to have two huge cabinets, four drawers each,” he says. “Now I just have this one little white one.”

The cabinets--crammed with paperwork essential to managing bus building contracts for Costa’s employer, the King County Department of Metropolitan Services in Seattle--and four others that occupied his boss’s office once formed an information traffic jam.

Although the files’ contents were needed by the departments that handle operations, maintenance, administration and safety and training, only Costa knew how to use the cryptic database that identified the files in which information was stored. The result was a work process that often crawled along at the pace of a Friday afternoon freeway.

Now the old cabinets are gone, replaced by an electronic filing system readily accessible by several dozen people simultaneously--including contractors, who dial in via modem from manufacturing and assembly sites in Toronto and New York.

The new system, based on software designed to help people work together, should allow Seattle’s transit system to manage several multimillion-dollar bus buying contracts at a time, thereby adding to the fleet more quickly and helping to keep commuters moving.

Working in a corner of the fifth floor of the downtown Exchange Building, Costa’s fleet procurement team oversees the complex process of expanding Seattle’s 1,200-bus Metro system. The three-person team is tiny, but it serves a pivotal role in the growth of the nation’s eighth-largest transit system. With no rail or subway alternatives, Seattle has invested heavily in its bus system, considered to be among America’s most innovative.

When gridlock along 3rd Avenue became a daily event in the 1980s, for example, the city dug a tunnel beneath the bustling retail and commercial district and bought 60-foot buses that run on diesel fuel at street level, then switch to electric power for the 1.3-mile subterranean route.

While the Metro’s buses are considered state-of-the-art, the fleet procurement team’s desktop PCs were, until recently, running 1986 technology. That year, Costa had implemented the department’s first-ever electronic database, using the then-popular dBase program.

By 1993, the database resembled a jalopy. Its main role was as a directory of file numbers, indicating in which drawer the manila file folder with the actual documents could be found. Even worse, only Costa had access to the database. His role as librarian burdened his already hectic day and often caused the work of others to grind to a halt.

“If anyone needed information and I wasn’t around, the request sat and waited until I was available,” he says.

In March, 1993, the Metro earmarked $20,000 to revamp the system. By choosing wisely among new personal computer technologies, the transit authority could bring to its business infrastructure the same level of innovation shown in its vehicles.

Officials saw the modernized system meeting several needs. First, it had to include a new database for taming the thousands of documents that were clogging departmental channels. It had to be easy to learn and open to anyone who needed it, including remote users such as contractors and Metro inspectors at manufacturing sites. And, to ensure that the transit authority got a reasonable return on its investment, the system had to be versatile enough to be adapted to other Metro needs.

Last June, the Metro began using a custom application designed for the transit authority using Lotus Notes, the leading entrant in the software category known as “groupware.”

Most software programs are designed with single users in mind. Notes’ features are geared to the needs of people who work as a group. Co-workers swap messages and ideas via electronic mail, and they write and route pertinent memos, letters and reports.

Most important, Notes lets co-workers collect a body of information that acts as the electronic equivalent of the departmental file cabinet. Just as you might open a file cabinet drawer and add a letter to a file, Notes lets you add documents to files that can be read and used by everyone in the group.

Information searches that used to take hours of paging through stacks of papers are now done in seconds. Group members help themselves to the letters or reports they need. Documents not created within Notes are scanned into the database.

The database automatically creates the audit trail required by state- and federally funded contracts, says Peter Weinrobe of Princeton, N.J.-based Trellis Network Services, which created the application.

It’s also powerful enough that the Metro’s information services staff can create other applications with it, freeing workers from reliance on expensive outside consultants.