Navigating the Path to Smart Facilities
King County’s Mission to Reach Optimal Space Management with Indoor GIS
Optimizing your facilities portfolio requires addressing many challenges.
The maintenance, security, occupant experience, and efficiency of managing your facilities is an ever-present and changing dynamic for many people that you work with.
Managing your facility portfolio space can be complex enough for standard tasks like serving work orders, collecting data about asset conditions, managing operational efficiency, and ensuring the right people are in the right place at the right time to get things done. The complexity rises further when you consider the challenges of efficient space management with a hybrid workforce—at one building, or across a geographically distributed set of facilities.
In King County, Washington, which is the 13th-most populous county in the US, optimizing the facilities portfolio is an especially complex space management challenge. With over 105 facilities distributed across 2,307 square miles serving the roughly 2.3 million residents, even relatively simple management tasks can become highly complicated at scale. Some of the larger facilities deliver a wide range of services to the public such as marriage licenses, vital records, taxpayer assistance, taxi permits and transit fare cards to name a few.
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The New Normal
When the pandemic hit, things changed for virtually every organization. For King County, those in the workforce who could work remotely were mandated to do so. 7,000 of the 15,000 county workforce transitioned to remote work overnight. This drastic shift left many county buildings almost empty. Today change continues. Return-to-office operations with a hybrid workforce is now one of the most important issues for county leaders.
The King County Department of Information Technology (KCIT), with its 450 IT employees and a well-established geographic information system (GIS), the King County GIS Center (KCGISC) which has been in operation for 25 years, applied a strong geographic outlook to county operations.
For example, geospatial analysis of employee home locations allowed IT leadership to identify the best sites to stand up geographically dispersed remote IT centers, which provided to King County employees better access to equipment replacements and other in-person tech services by removing the barrier of employees having to travel to KCIT’s main offices in downtown Seattle. GIS as a practice, solutions like ArcGIS Indoors, and other capabilities enable informed decision making for IT leaders.
GIS at the county has long been used to enhance the day-to-day business operations of many departments, as well as the standalone projects. Long standing GIS applications in King County have been in the Road Services Division as a foundational component of asset and workorder management practices.
Transit systems have also been leveraging GIS from the early days of the technology at King County. Functions like asset management, supporting route planning, bus annunciation of stops, landmarks for ADA compliance, and other critical operations have been among the many workflows that have been enhanced by taking a geographic approach.
ArcGIS Indoors has opened a whole new facet for GIS at King County. We have always thought of GIS from the perspective of where on the earth with asset management ([that is], bus stops, stop signs, signals, etc.), political boundaries, and land management. With Indoors, we have opportunities beyond cube reservations and can consider management of assets inside buildings by floor and other aspects of facility management. —Tamara Davis, King County GIS Center Manager
However, with the new challenges related to optimal space utilization, desk reservations, density management, and hybrid workforce management, the KCGISC saw an opportunity to manage this at scale.
Defining the Roadmap
Implementing ArcGIS Indoors was another strategic opportunity for the KCGISC to further the vision of GIS as a core enterprise business platform for King County. This implementation was also chance to showcase geospatial data for facilities management as never seen before at King County.
We believe ArcGIS Indoors will expose that platform to new customers, spark new conversations, and generate new opportunities.—Stephen Heard, Chief Technology Officer, King County
As personnel levels changed in various departments since the start of the pandemic, some departments remained primarily remote, while others sought a hybrid return to the office. Space utilization demands shifted, and the team needed a responsive method to manage these changes and optimize for greater efficiency—choosing ArcGIS Indoors as the solution.
The King County Facilities Management team and the KCGISC team also saw this as a decisive moment to take the first steps toward developing a smart building management model for maintenance and service operations.
With 105 buildings in the facilities portfolio, there was no shortage of options to start from—but the team needed to be strategic. Two large buildings in the county's portfolio—the Yesler Building and King County Administration Building in downtown Seattle—faced life cycle transitions that prompted a need for scalable space management and indoor mapping. These two buildings had high employee occupancy, but several department heads were showing indications that they were shifting to a primarily remote environment. These older buildings presented significant challenges to modify to meet new workforce demands, so they were slated to be vacated, with employees consolidated into other buildings. However, employees still needed access to an office for collaboration, and the ability to work in a quiet and productive space—and so grew an optimal space management use case.
The two facilities chosen for phase one of the ArcGIS Indoors implementation (the 13-floor Chinook Building and 8-floor King Street Center), while having the greatest employee density, also needed to account for all customer services moving to the King Street Center, further reducing available space for employees.
The Transformation Journey Begins
While the technical requirements to manage space of this size comes with unique challenges, the people management considerations are also critically important to ensure a sustainable solution is developed, that meets stakeholder needs.
Recognizing that each agency may want to manage their hotel spaces differently and want varying levels of control, KCGISC implemented Agency Captains and Administrators who would be responsible for internal communications. Eventually, these individuals would also be responsible for governing cubicle or hotel management within the Reservation Manager.
Having the Esri Advantage Program created an edge for choosing and implementing ArcGIS Indoors. It gave the KCGIS Center team the ability to bypass a lengthy procurement process since they could use or buy credits and gave them access to the Early Adopter program.
As a member of the Esri Early Adopter Community, King County was a front-runner in the development of ArcGIS Indoors. Through the close partnership between Esri's Indoors product management and developer teams and the KCGISC team, product and deployment features were enhanced, evolved, and better tailored to meet the practical needs of all customers for a more seamless experience. For example, Microsoft Intune (unified endpoint management service) is a requirement for King County to use any mobile apps for services. The Esri teams adapted ArcGIS Indoors implementation to support this service, which allowed subsequent customers to bypass this hurdle.
But there were some very tangible goals to achieve, along with the paradigm shift of adopting a GIS approach to space management. Key on the list was a desk reservation system with a rich, intuitive user interface. Additionally, having a detailed indoor map of the facilities with floors, offices, cubicles, employee data, and other facilities information for service and security management was necessary to create a viable solution. With so many employees, an adaptive data store with account information is critical to a sustainable solution. Employee accounts would need to be synced automatically, nightly, to ensure that users could engage with the reservation spaces they needed to and the GIS team didn't need to manually update records.
Beyond selecting the right facilities to begin phase one of their indoor GIS model, there proved to be other challenges. Not all building floor plans were up to date, and the quality of the floor plan data was widely distributed. Some stakeholders presented PDF floor plans, others delivered AutoCAD files with varying levels of currency and quality for GIS. Additionally, some floors were not received until late in the data conversion phase, and several floor layers were being altered as the data conversion took place. Throughout the conversion process from AutoCAD files to indoor floor plan models in ArcGIS Indoors, conversion errors needed to be meticulously eradicated to ensure that a functional indoor map was created.
One of the critical components identified as a checkpoint along the journey is the deployment of space reservation capabilities for employees returning to the office to reserve cubicles and view an indoor map to find their way to the cubicle they reserved. Integration with Microsoft 365 allowed resource mailboxes to be developed with appropriate cubicle records in the building model to ensure that the reservations for cubicles, offices, and meeting spaces could be properly stored and referenced. Later updates to ArcGIS Indoors have added a Reservation layer, which serves the purpose of housing these space reservations.
Evaluating Success and Accelerating Momentum
The two phase one buildings have a combined 21 floors and 625,413 square feet mapped (303,939 ft² in the Chinook Building and 321,474 ft² in the King Street Center Building), with a total 588 reservable work spaces and capacity for 3,400 employees.
Spaces throughout both phase one facilities are classified by use type, like offices, cubicles, meeting rooms, and lunchrooms, and have symbology assigned to the maps for specific assets users would be interested in, such as restrooms, stairs, elevators, printers, and other commonly used features.
Agency Captains rely on space management dashboards, which show real-time space usage statistics and reservations by department to inform future planning initiatives. The Indoors mobile app for employees to manage reservations will be launching later in 2023.
Tamara Davis, KCGISC manager, sees an opportunity with indoor GIS, "Initially, we will be able to monitor actual usage of building space. Over time and depending on space utilization metrics, the county may decide to use the reservable cube spaces differently. We will have the ability to make data-driven decisions based on how efficiently we are using our space."
Indoor GIS has the power to provide more than transactional value to facilities managers and users. Executives and decision-makers need to adapt to a shifted work dynamic, meeting employees with innovative workplaces that serve post-pandemic work styles to produce better experiences.
A big driver for us is rethinking what it means to have a work space, leveraging more collaborative spaces. How are we going to create meaningful engagements in an intentional way, instead of just checking the box?
People are not coming in the office every day, and when they do come in, they don't want to be in an empty office. We are developing interactive spaces, as opposed to just cubicles, to facilitate team engagement and rediscover the best part of in-office work. —Tamara Davis, King County GIS Center Manager
Since implementing ArcGIS Indoors, the team at KCGISC has been busy growing the dataset in the floor-aware indoor maps and building an ecosystem to meet the functional needs of stakeholders. There has been an increase in the number of users for indoor GIS applications in the two current building deployments, as well as growing awareness of the role indoor maps can play for other buildings throughout the county as the initial two-building phase one has evolved to include five total facilities in the second phase.
Improved space utilization has become a very important metric to monitor—assigning dollar values to square footage, driving the KCGISC and department stakeholders to be even more efficient with real estate optimizations and offers opportunity to further innovate with space management. The mindset shift this location-based space management approach produces cannot be overstated. Empowering the public sector to achieve innovation with hyper efficient resource management creates greater availability of cost generation while saving residents money, which everyone can be happy about.
The Road Ahead
So, what will become of the vacant old King County Administration Building and Yesler Building? There is an active proposal from the King County Executive to donate the King County Administration Building to Sound Transit, so the land can be repurposed for a brand-new Midtown Station in an expansion of the Sound Transit regional light rail line. The vision is to turn this part of downtown, currently a "9-5 government center," into a 24-hour neighborhood that includes residences, restaurants, and gathering places alongside government offices. In an area without much available real estate, like most major cities, large-scale space optimization and land renovation initiatives rely on intelligent insights to bring positive impact to all parties.
The King County Executive proposal focuses on repurposing aging infrastructure with better space utilization, developed through GIS.
As potential customers explore indoor GIS deployments to more buildings in the county, the use cases have become more diverse. Some customers seek to expand their use of location to other buildings in their portfolio to elevate building occupant experience, offering wayfinding for the public with kiosks (like in courthouse buildings), or for safety and security operations (mapping exits, fire extinguishers, automated external defibrillator [AED] machines). Other customers aim to go beyond space reservation and wayfinding, with a heavier emphasis on critical facilities management workflows for maintenance and triage services.
- Enterprise asset management (EAM)—Visualizing life cycle management of interior assets such as computers, machines, electronics, and their maintenance schedules
- Integrated workplace management system (IWMS)—Visualizing operational records including company directories and seating assignments at a portfolio scale
- Computerized maintenance management system (CMMS)—Visualizing life cycle management of facilities maintenance requests including triage and scheduled resolution
The practical application of such a robust implementation of indoor GIS would allow service technicians to receive equipment alerts in a dashboard or in a mobile app, tied to a specific location and accompanied by directions to get to the problem, and details about the asset and fault to triage urgent issues.
Also, regularly scheduled maintenance work orders could be strategically routed to technicians based on location, reducing wasted time traveling back and forth across a large facility serving work orders, or showing up to service an asset without the most recent condition information—like maintenance schedules, related asset health, and precise locations.
One such customer, the King County Wastewater Treatment Division, has expressed interest in developing a fully integrated building management system in hypercomplex facilities. Its goal is a complete digital twin—bringing together large numbers of assets, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, work order management, indoor positioning systems (IPS)—visualized in a true digital representation of the facilities within the GIS.
The beauty of King County's vision for leveraging its indoor GIS as a complete infrastructure management system is that these scenarios are completely within reach, through the various integrations with current systems that add context to the maps to make them even more powerful.
Leveraging location intelligence—the insight gained from visualizing and analyzing geospatial data—executives and facilities managers can prepare for emergencies and predict regular maintenance schedules, see relationships between seemingly disparate data points and systems, and make informed decisions to increase operational efficiency and reduce downtime. Cost savings and enhanced occupant experience are commonly held goals that are achieved through a geographic approach.
Mobile apps built with indoor GIS enable users to reserve offices, navigate to points of interest or workorders, and gather information about the facility.
Location intelligence is becoming more common as a strategic imperative outside of the KCGISC—at King County, for countless other organizations, and even for the public. Whether everyone is aware of them or not, GIS analyses and maps are quite often an expectation and a crucial factor in informing decisions, though they may not receive the recognition they deserve.
King County has a long history and deep investment in GIS. For many agencies GIS is foundational to their day-to-day business operations and intelligence. Even as pervasive as GIS is throughout King County there continues to be a wealth of untapped opportunities to leverage GIS data and technology. We want to see spatial analytics and location intelligence to be ubiquitous throughout all county agencies as geography is a component of every major decision made by these organizations and individuals every day.
Tamara Davis - King County GIS Center Manager
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