C oncepts Fishbeck, Thompson, Carr & Huber, Inc. Summer 2013 oncepts C Let’s try a word association exercise: What comes to mind when you hear the word, campus? You may immediately think of winding, tree-covered paths full of students meandering through the quad on a bright fall aſternoon – the seng of a university, college, or school. But business parks, health profession complexes, and industrial sites are considered campuses too. In fact, any collecon of grouped facilies managed by a single enty can be considered a campus. It can be located at a single site or an assortment of sites around the world. Campuses with a physical presence share one commonality: they are environments in geographic space made up of buildings and their supporng infrastructure – collecvely known as assets. The assets on a campus are similar to those found in a small city. And just like cies, campuses require a steward – a person or team to manage, plan, and maintain them. This management team oversees a variety of assets at mulple scales, from big picture planning to accommodate growth, changing business pracces, and technology, to the more detailed planning required to maintain the current systems on a daily basis. From the macro to the micro, one tool is ideally suited to help campus facilies managers do their job: geographic informaon systems, or GIS. Ask campus facilies managers what keeps them up at night and you may hear, “I need to know what assets we have and where they are located, understand key informaon about them, and GIS: THE APP FOR CAMPUS MANAGEMENT be able to quickly access more detailed record documents with confidence.” Unl recently, this was accomplished within a paper-driven paradigm; think coffee-stained blueprints and color-coded spreadsheets. But using paper for data storage and retrieval is inefficient and hinders a manager’s ability to seamlessly access informaon and incorporate it across mulple facilies and infrastructure systems. What paper hinders, GIS makes possible. In GIS, the facilies manager has a system to record and track all campus assets, so they can be dealt with immediately in case of emergency or provide informaon for more detailed studies of a parcular system. GIS helps the campus facilies manager understand campus geography and make informed decisions through its extraordinary spaal visualizaon and analycal tools. Using GIS, a facilies manager can, for example, understand where the campus’s steam and condensate return lines run, recognize where fiber opc and telephone lines are buried, and idenfy the locaon of storm and sanitary sewers in a single soſtware applicaon. GIS can be used collaboravely with other mapping tools, such as CAD and BIM, to make them more effecve. Not only do campus managers have to oversee many types of facility and ulity informaon, they also must employ sound capital improvement planning strategies to maintain and develop their assets. The days of waing for a problem to occur “I need to know what assets we have and where they are located, understand key information about them...” GIS graphic by ESRI ArcGIS©