GIS in Campus Operations: Not a One Size Fits All Solution
My name is Zach Jaffe and I am the founder and CEO of Map I.T., an Esri business partner. We specialize in data collection and 3D reality capture, CAD, BIM, ArcGIS Indoors, and GIS for infrastructure projects, utilizing the most up-to-date and cutting-edge technologies. When I was asked to contribute to Esri’s FIRST Campus Operations blog, there were so many topics to discuss it was hard to select just one.
I have been working as a GIS, surveyor, and reality capture specialist for colleges, universities and K-12 school districts for nearly a decade and have seen and heard it all, with so many different unique use-cases. Instead of diving into to just one of those campus stories, I’d like to take a step back and review what I am seeing as a whole, across the industry.
Let's get real – GIS in Campus Operations is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Every campus has different departments, capabilities, workflows, software, and available data (or lack thereof). Every campus has different driving factors for either beginning or advancing their GIS practices.
Driving factors for implementing GIS across campus operations may be for safety and security, space planning, asset management, capital improvement projects, utility management or others. Sometimes it’s a collaboration between departments and sometimes it’s just one department that is spear heading the initiative.
To paint the picture just how different the GIS deployment can be for a campus, I’ve highlighted three different examples of campuses and school districts to show just how different the uses cases can be.
Campus Utility Mapping
A university campus is responsible for asset management. On numerous occasions during construction projects, contractors and utility workers have hit or disturbed sub-surface utilities due to inaccurate and outdated plans that are as ancient as the hills. They did not trust their records and needed a better way to communicate critical information to maintenance crews and contractors.
The university decided to begin their new GIS program for their facilities department that helps manage the campus and it’s contractors. Knowing the fact good data is key to a successful GIS program, they hired a firm specializing in sub-surface utility mapping to perform a sub-surface utility survey utilizing GPR techniques to accurately map their utilities. The data produced from the survey will be imported into a geodatabase to be utilized in the various Esri platforms and integrated into their daily workflows. As a result, they will be able to better communicate critical asset information to all maintenance workers and contractors who work on campus and have an improved practice for managing and maintaining campus infrastructure data.
ArcGIS Indoors for Population Growth and Capacity Planning
One of the largest school districts in the US manages over 200 schools and buildings with a student population growing annually. While they had accurate floor plans of their facilities, they were struggling to keep up with tracking their space usage, space capacity, capacity planning, and other analytics.
To better understand the needs and requirements for each building and space, they are deploying the ArcGIS Indoors solution to bring their floor plans into various dashboards to be able to efficiently and effectively communicate this important information to decision makers and school planners.
ArcGIS Indoors for Space Planning
A university is losing their legacy space planning due to the software being retired. It is critical for staff and department heads to be able to assign faculty to specific offices for seat assignments, hot desking, hoteling, and other space planning activities. The university turned to ArcGIS Indoors as a possible solution. It has many of the space planning capabilities their legacy system has and offers them additional functionality through various field mobility solutions that they were looking for. In addition to space planning, they also recognize the ability to use the Esri ecosystem and GIS for additional departments like their facility and utility managers who are looking to improve and streamline their workflows.
The Common Denominator
A campus might fall into a similar category as these three examples, or it could be vastly different. The common denominator is that they each started “small” with one very specific use-case and goal in mind.
What am I seeing in the industry as a whole? GIS is not a one size fits all solution. GIS is a solution that can be perfectly tailored, sliced and diced to serve your campus’s needs.
Everyone is at a different starting point with their own unique challenges to solve and but just by selecting one use-case for one department to resolve with GIS, it opens the organization up for opportunities to allow GIS to deliver more solutions across the board.
With Esri’s release of ArcGIS Indoors, partnership with Autodesk and other 3D advancements, clearly GIS has expanded far beyond the original points, lines, and polygons that everyone was used to for so long. And with these advancements, it is giving the opportunity to capitalize on GIS in so many ways. As an organization, you just need to decide where to begin and let the technology and your goals take it from there.
If you are interested in learning more about how your campus operations could benefit from a customized GIS solution, I highly encourage reaching out to colleagues in the industry who have implemented these solutions, reading success stories, or for more detailed information, reaching out to myself at zjaffe@map-it-llc.com or visiting our website, www.map-it-llc.com. Good luck on your GIS journey!