Jonathan Hodel, P.E., GISP, Principal
Many facility managers know that they need a GIS for their campus but may not know where to begin. This post will look at some recommended steps for implementing a successful campus GIS using the ArcGIS platform when you have little or nothing to start with. If you’re starting from scratch to build your campus GIS, you may have some data to begin with. Or you might just be looking to provide management with some budget numbers. If either of these are true, you’ve come to the right place.
Strategic planning
The strategic planning process involves some basic steps that may take several weeks to several months, depending on the cooperation received from other departments and key decision-makers. The general steps for strategic planning involve:
Identify Benefits
A good first step in planning is to first identify areas where a campus GIS can provide benefits. Here are five areas where we’ve seen customers benefit from a campus GIS program that may resonate with you as well:
Central repository for all of your facility data
Improved access to floor plans
A workflow for getting accurate as-builts
Improved sharing of site data among your staff
Better spatial information for equipment and assets
Get Buy-In
Getting buy-in from high-level decision-makers is of critical importance and is a key first step. Without support from at least one champion at the executive level, your program may struggle to get off the ground Often, this step involves educating them on how GIS can benefit the organization using examples of other real-world GIS applications. It often helps to bring in the assistance of a consultant in this phase to help clearly communicate the benefits of a GIS program.
Interview Users
Getting buy-in from other staff and departments is just as important as buy-in from high-level decision-makers. The more potential users you identify, the more success you will have at justifying the investment in a campus GIS.Talk to them, ask them questions, and document their needs to create a more powerful argument for justifying the investment. Here are a few questions to ask yourself to help get you started:
Who is going to be using GIS?
How often will they be using it?
How can they benefit from it?
How can we save them time using GIS?
Involve IT
IT is often the backbone to any successful GIS program. Be sure to involve them early and often to make sure that you have the proper hardware, software, and bandwidth to set up your GIS program for success right from the start. You can provide your IT department with several options for an enterprise GIS environment including on-premise, cloud-hosted by organization, or cloud-externally hosted. If you’re looking for a hosted cloud solution that will save time and maintenance for both you and your IT department, consider Cloudpoint’s cloud-managed ArcGIS Enterprise services or Esri’s ArcGIS Online platform.
Cloudpoint offers a Geospatial Assessment and Progress (GAPS) analysis to assist with strategic GIS planning if you would like to evaluate your GIS program and have a benchmark for improving upon each year.
Find/create gis data
Campus Basemap
Finding and creating GIS data is probably one of the easier steps in the process. First, you will want to begin creating a campus basemap. Esri has templates and tools available to help get you started with building your campus basemap and including it with their widely-used community maps. Getting data to build your campus basemap involves searching local, state, and national geospatial datasets for GIS layers that could be useful for your organization. Most of these may be freely available, but don’t be afraid to pay a reasonable fee for purchasing quality data or for a subscription service that will provide continual updates to your data. Examples could include building footprints, parcel datasets, or aerial imagery from your local county, municipality, or an online service provider. Some online service providers such as Nearmaps offer quarterly updates to their imagery datasets which are delivered directly as a map service feed into your ArcGIS environment.
Facility Floor Plans
There are a few different methods for creating facility floor plan layers depending on the digital floor plan information you have available to you, as well as your level of desired detail. Many organizations have CAD or BIM files, which are a great starting point for floor plan information. Others may be limited to pdf plans or construction drawings that may require digitizing to get them in electronic format. If you lack digital records or find that your floor plan records are inaccurate, you may want to consider contracting with a vendor to provide indoor mapping services. Cloudpoint can provide onsite scanning services to easily generate 2D digital floor plans or even 3D digital twins if needed and has a variety of other partners that can assist depending on the nature of your project. It would be best practice to consider an Esri business partner with an Indoor GIS specialty designation when looking for indoor mapping services.
Many campuses are finding Esri’s Indoor GIS solution to be very configurable and an ideal pathway to bringing indoor maps to their organization’s users. If your floor plan layers are migrated or created using the ArcGIS Indoors Information Model (AIIM), you can easily take advantage of Esri’s many out-of-the-box configurable templates and features once your maps are published. These features include Indoor Navigation, Indoor Mapping & Wayfinding, Space Planning & Management, and Indoor Analytics and Data Collection.
Deploy an Enterprise gis environment
An Enterprise GIS environment allows you to share your campus GIS and facility information with the public or securely within your organization in real-time. Esri’s primary enterprise platforms consist of ArcGIS Online (cloud-based) and ArcGIS Enterprise (on-premise or cloud). Either of these systems may be used as your primary source for sharing GIS information, however many campuses choose a combination of these platforms or a hybrid approach for the best results. Cloudpoint has YouTube playlists for both ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise for additional assistance and tutorials if you’d like to learn more about deploying or managing your own Enterprise GIS environment.
Establish GIS Workflows
Establishing GIS workflows is important when developing a long-term sustainable campus GIS. These workflows allow for the GIS data to be updated on a routine basis. Building out GIS data layers may prove to be counterproductive if there is not a valid workflow that can be used to update and maintain the data. These workflows can utilize a number of ArcGIS tools such as Survey123, ArcGIS Field Maps, Operations Dashboard, and ArcGIS Experience Builder. When considering how to implement GIS workflows, it’s important to know the technical capabilities of your end users as well as the frequency of required updates. In many cases, end users do not need to know GIS in order to make updates to the data. A well-thought-out plan for updating GIS data layers can save administrators a lot of time on the back end.
A sample campus GIS portal configured using ArcGIS Experience Builder
Campus GIS Services Procurement
For those who may not have the staff or GIS expertise to get up and running with a campus GIS program, contact our Campus GIS team for assistance on how to begin strategizing and implementing a program. If a competitive bidding process is required by your organization, contact us for a sample RFP for Campus GIS that may be used to help get your organization pointed in the right direction.
Cloudpoint Geospatial is a professional GIS services provider and Esri business partner helping facility managers and campus IT directors implement geospatial solutions that improve data-driven decision-making to maximize the efficiency of their campus facility operations.