When Chris Akin walks onto a new campus, he starts with a deceptively simple question: do you know where your utilities are? After 25 years leading GIS implementations in higher education, the President of Paratum Solutions has learned that the answer reveals everything about how an institution manages its spatial data — and where the biggest opportunities are hiding.
In this Bow Tie Tuesday conversation with Alyson Goff, Senior Director of Insights and Strategy at CampusIQ, Chris shares how campuses are using geographic information systems to centralize facility data, create aha moments for stakeholders, and build GIS programs from the ground up — even with teams of one or two people.
— Start with the pain points. The institutions that get the most from GIS are the ones solving real, immediate problems: missing floor plans, unknown utility locations, untracked assets. Making data centralized, shareable, and accessible is the foundation.
— Let people complain about it. Chris's framework for driving GIS adoption: put a tool in stakeholders' hands and let them react. When they start saying "this doesn't do what I need" or "this data is wrong," that frustration is the aha moment — it means they see the potential.
— Quick wins beat perfect systems. Brown University has no in-house GIS staff, yet runs a full GIS program through Paratum. The key: start simple, get data into people's hands fast, and build momentum from there. A basic AED inspection app that tells someone which devices are due next month can make their day.
— Indoor GIS and real-time occupancy are converging. The future of campus operations is integrating utilization data, student scheduling, energy monitoring, and security into a single geospatial platform — enabling institutions to forecast how facilities are used and optimize accordingly.
Discover how CampusIQ helps institutions turn real-time occupancy data into smarter space decisions — no new hardware required. Explore our resources for facilities leaders and campus planners.
Read Full TranscriptAlyson Goff: What typically drives an institution to come to you? What problem are they trying to solve?
Chris Akin: Yeah, I guess the first bit of it is I ask a lot of times dumb questions. Do you know where the utilities are? Do you ever hit a utility because you didn't know it was there? Do you have updated floor plans? Do you have a problem tracking your spaces or your assets? That's where GIS can come in, help you figure out what you've got and where it's at so we can start making some smart decisions with it. But it comes down to putting all this data together and I say making this data centralized, shareable, and accessible. So we start putting this data in people's hands and getting it out there so they can start using it and being productive.
Alyson Goff: What are some aha moments that you've seen when you help facilitate conversations on campus about the power of GIS?
Chris Akin: That is the most fun I have, is helping create those aha moments. I love it and every campus, every facility gets a different aha moment. I have started some where we start with college football game day mapping, and the next one will be started to talk about shutoff valves, and then another one where we're getting traction with the floor plans or space planning.
I will have conversations. I find that everybody I talk to has some different needs, different opportunity. Every campus is different. And I guess our goal is to find where those opportunities are. My big thing is I want to give you a tool that you complain about. I want you to look at it and go, this does not do what I need it to do. I wish it did this. Your data's wrong. And they start complaining about it, and that's the aha moment, going oh, now they can start to see they can do this with it, and they want to do that. And we do a lot of pilot projects for folks to help them get to those aha moments. People don't get it until they see it, and oftentimes they've got to see it with their data.
The more we start showing this to different people and style it by condition assessments or by utilization or by age and wear and tear. You name it. And then people go, oh, that's great. Can we now pivot to look at sidewalks and the number of cracks they have? Or the roof conditions or how much carpet we have. It's amazing. You start putting it in their hands and you give them the right to complain about it and you start getting some good traction that way.
Alyson Goff: A lot of institutions have very small GIS teams, like usually one or two people. And so it feels like how do I scale? How do I get started? How am I not overwhelmed? But also how do I build support and momentum internally?
Chris Akin: We thrive on those zero to two person shops. The people who have nobody doing GIS or maybe one or two people. We can support the large ones as well, but they've got all kinds of other challenges. Those small ones that are just kind of sometimes over there saying, how do we get buy-in? We've worked with a lot of colleges like that, like Brown University. Large institution has no GIS people. We basically are their GIS team. And what we found to be very effective with Brown and other clients are start making applications, start putting this data together, start putting it in people's hands, and again, let them complain about it.
Very effective. If you can start making quick wins to get into people's hands, don't overthink it. Simplify it if you have to, and then you can always build on it. That's been the most effective and the ones that really succeed, you're trying to make a lot of people happy, not overcomplicated. And I've been guilty of it in the past of overcomplicating things and being too in the weeds. But sometimes here's a simple app to inspect your AEDs and tell me which ones are due coming up in the next few months. You just made somebody's day.
Alyson Goff: What do you think that's going to look like for campus management? Campus operations over the next three to five years?
Chris Akin: This goes back to my answer about bringing all this data together. Imagine looking at your building and say, okay, what's my current utilization? What's my previous utilization? Start looking at where people are actually at this moment through tracking. But then now we start comparing that to the student scheduling aspect. We can tie that into the energy monitoring. Well, if we're going to have classes running, we need to make sure we have buildings heated up or cooled down or ready to go for them, but also can we move one class in this building over here and utilize it more effectively?
And then at the same time, looking at your security aspect, being able to pull all that data together. And that utilization is a key part of that. Being able to say, okay, how are my facilities actually being used? How can we forecast those and improve that process going forward? And yeah, I'm a little biased, but at the end of the day, that's all spatial data. And so how do we put that all together? The answer is GIS.