Watch the Full Conversation (13 min)
Most campuses keep their floor plans in one system, their work orders in another, and their occupancy data somewhere else again. Sue Stewart has spent more than two decades at The University of Texas at Austin working to pull those records onto a single map. She started out typing work orders and now leads geospatial operations for the whole campus. Her name for the goal is a common operating picture: one shared view of campus conditions, resources, and activity that anyone who needs it can read. In this Bolo Tie Tuesday edition, she and Aaron Benz talk through how she built support for campus GIS one small, visible win at a time, and where space management and occupancy data fit once the map is in place.
→ Start with one use case people can see. Sue earned the first public-facing win with a safety project, mapping emergency phones on weekend mornings over a Texas summer with her own phone.
→ Expect it to take years. Her advice to other institutions is to treat GIS adoption as a marathon, a run of small wins that eventually shows people what the map can do.
→ A public map grows with its audience. UT's campus map started as buildings and a few safety layers. Once leadership and marketing weighed in, it added coffee, residence halls, student resources, and arts spaces.
→ A common operating picture lets people keep their own systems. Teams keep their tools while the map layers occupancy, work orders, automation, and space records into one view.
→ GIS can create data, not just display it. Handheld collection, 360 photos, and 3D indoor mapping are moving UT toward asset locations that operations staff can use directly.
See what your campus data can tell you
Explore more Bow Tie Tuesday conversations, reports, and insights on space, occupancy, and campus planning. Browse CampusIQ resources.
Welcome to a special edition of Bow Tie Tuesday as it's Bolo Tie Tuesday here with another Texas institution. Please welcome Sue Stewart. Sue has been at UT Austin for more than two decades, I believe. Starting out as an assistant, getting a CS degree, working herself up from work orders to all of a sudden the assistant director of geospatial operations. She is the former president of CFTA. Without further ado, Sue, welcome to Bow Tie Tuesday. Thank you, Aaron. I appreciate you having me.
Well, I find your job absolutely fascinating, right? You are effectively responsible for something like 30 million square feet, 750 buildings. Maybe you could help just describe like your central role and kind of the goal that you take and are responsible for. So at the university, we manage a lot of the master records, two dimensional, three dimensional records, building floor plans, utility infrastructure, and we manage the campus GIS, geographical information system. And we use that information. Everything is tied together. We transform from one system to another, and it allows us a lot of flexibility to bring new buildings online to maintain our base map as buildings change, where sidewalks changing, where the entrance is. And we use all of the tools in our arsenal and we keep these all systems alive. At the end of the day, right, we're talking about managing really for you a series of small cities, right? Obviously the biggest kind of one, UT Austin, but it's more than just UT Austin.
When you think about GIS and your stakeholders, right? Like who, what should we know? Like who comes to mind or what are the use cases that you're serving or who do you partner with to go to go get wins? So we have a variety of users from our general public. We have a ton of visitors every year, students who navigate the campus. We have faculty and staff who need to work in these buildings. They need to get from point A to point B. So, we have a variety of audiences, but we also support not only the academic mission, but also campus operations and planning facilities, operations, emergency management. So it's a lot of everything. So I know a lot of institutions, right? They always have somebody passionate about GIS. I don't know how many institutions have as up to date and as great tools as you all have built.
How have you all made that successful at UT, right? What did you have to do to keep building momentum or, do you have like one or two examples where, somebody was listening from another university say, hey, I want to make GIS matter. I want to make more data matter. Like what would advice or some practical applications be? So my advice is it's a marathon, not a sprint. You're going to need to have perseverance for everything that you're going to do will be a series of small wins. And eventually people realize what it is that you can do. And then the values start showing.
So, for instance, early on, as I, tried to garner or gather GIS adoption, I focused on a use case for emergency management and safety related things. And I spent a Texas summer in the heat only between the hours of eight and noon. But every weekend for a whole, every weekend, Saturday and Sunday over a summer, I inventoried all our entrances, the emergency phones on campus using my cell phone. I wanted to demonstrate the technology. I thought the value for campus was vital. You know, when it comes to safety and security, you don't always think clearly if you're under duress. And so I just felt it was really important. And so I made the commitment and I built our first, our first win. We had many wins, but this was our first, public facing win that people started to take notice.
Then we fast forward about a year and we built a new campus map and we looked at what our campus would need and, leadership had some recommendations and our university and marketing communications also had some recommendations. And I went from buildings in a few layers related to safety to where can I get coffee? Where are our dormitories? Where are our student resources? Where's our welcome center? Where are sports arenas? And we really looked at campus as like holistically as a big picture, arts and outdoor spaces, health services. And it's, it's been, it's been really rewarding to be able to share that information with the public and our campus map still to this day, I think gets about 3000 hits. And I know what ebbs and flows, right. I'm sure game day is probably a little more, yeah. But, that is the average over the year. And it, I'm just completely amazed when I take the time, occasionally someone will ask me, well, what are your stats look like? And I'll look at them and I'm, I'm floored. Wow, people are still using this, you know? And so it's making me think about what's next and collect feedback from app users. What else can we put on here? And so we're really trying to be responsive to the needs of the campus community.
Yeah, I know one of the words or kind of phrases that you've used, I love for you just to help maybe articulate what it means to people. Because I think it's a, that as soon as you have a map and then you're overlaying data on that map, it kind of becomes alive almost, right. And so use the words a common operating picture. How do we have a common operating picture? Can you elaborate, what does that mean to you? And how should others think about that? So to me, a common operating picture is a shared integrated view of campus conditions, resources, activity. And so instead of relying on isolated information systems, you can access a single, operational environment where you can get real time or historical information, in the context of geography, facilities, infrastructure, looking at what's going on, not only in a space, but around space. And I think that's what, to me, a common operating picture is.
And a common operating picture, and we are in the process of building this ourselves, is things like occupancy analysis and automation systems, work order systems, space management. Instead of going into these separate systems, how can we just overlay that and make that data readily accessible and viewable by people who need to see it? Yeah, that's I think the, I'm so aligned to that vision, right. There's so many different disparate systems that don't talk to one another. How do we provide some kind of interface, right, where it's not just what do we have, which is great, right. That sounds like it solved a series of real problems that people are still using that map today, but also what does it look like to be alive to extend the new use cases, new possibilities? And maybe that's what's next, right.
When you think about what's next or what's inspiring to you or what you're looking forward to doing, maybe to help wrap up this Bolo Tie Tuesday, right. What's exciting you about? What's the next level of that common operating picture or how you might apply it to you? Oh, my goodness. They often say in GIS, you're limited by your imagination. And so I can I think of so many use cases that overlay. Well, where are people today? And what kind of spaces are they in? What what kind of activities are taking place? What are what are taking place outside and allowing campus to make really informed strategic decisions? And really, that's that's my vision. You know, my vision is to support everyone else's business needs and to show them that they can continue to work in their systems. But we can pull all this information together and we can show them demonstrate how important it is to see the context from other people's business. That's what I love about a map, right? You get to the more you have, it's actually filling in that context, right? What does it really mean? What's really happening? That that's actually where it kind of goes from like data to insights, right? And then into applications.
And GIS is not just a BI tool where the data has to be created someplace else, you can also create your own data. So exciting that not only can you visualize it and, you can create the data, you can use handheld tools, take photos with apps that end up directly in there. And we are looking to move indoors into 3D GIS mapping and trying to another level. Yeah, trying to leverage 360 photos and ways that we can partner with our facilities to identify assets. And we can start mapping the locations of assets and providing not only, better experience for people who have to navigate and circulate the campus, but allowing, the operational staff access to these tools as well. And understanding that they're just as important as getting our students from class to class, because without the buildings, without the systems, the university is going to struggle to keep up with the demand. Students, game day is a perfect example of.
Well, you take a dynamic institution, right? That's always evolving. Everything is getting more expensive, right? In a city, right? That always has other things also going on that impact campus, right? It's how do you bring your tools to life? And that's what, when you're talking about that, I'm man, yeah, how do I have a living, breathing operational context where we can all visualize, see the same thing and empower our stakeholders with basically better data to make better decisions? And that to me is the goal of common operating picture. And that is why I'm so excited that we are moving in that direction.
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure having you on Bolo Tie Tuesday. We'll have to have to have one in the future as well. Oh, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Aaron. It was a pleasure.