Practice Makes Perfect

Having a small GIS team and a large organization to serve means that business practices and technology must be closely aligned, as the Port of Los Angeles’s Christine Thome relates.

Scarce resources and the complex interactions of a large number of stakeholders characterize the environment inhabited by the geographic information system (GIS) team at the Port of Los Angeles (POLA).

The US’s largest port by container volume (which forms the predominant part of its business), POLA handles 20 percent of all cargo coming into the country. It adjoins the Port of Long Beach—itself second-ranked in the US in terms of numbers of TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) handled—and is administered by the Los Angeles Harbor Department.

POLA’s location, next to Long Beach and approximately 20 miles south of downtown, at the end of an unbroken land corridor—which provides the City of Los Angeles with its justification for ownership—results in a complex environment in terms of land ownership/lease and jurisdictional abutments.

Operation of the terminals is carried out by the individual terminal operators, while the POLA serves predominantly as a landlord port, a situation common in port environments. As a result, there are numerous stakeholders at the port with divided responsibilities. This gives rise to commercial confidentiality issues relating to data collection and data sharing within the port environment.

The challenge for POLA’s full-time GIS specialists is to build and maintain access to accurate data, and to introduce greater efficiencies for multiple stakeholders across a geographically disparate and densely occupied area, which cumulatively constitutes a business worth well over $300 billion annually.

Given that there are just two of them—GIS manager Christine Thome and her colleague, Pei-San Tsai—this requires some deft footwork, a light touch, and very targeted efforts.

POLA’s GIS effort started in the aftermath of 9/11, with an application for grant funding to support Los Angeles Port Police (LAPP) functions. It was recognized very early on that this had to be map-based, but much of the relevant information was tightly siloed. A consultant was engaged to get all the necessary data into the base layers of a credible enterprise GIS. A disadvantage was that POLA then remained reliant upon external expertise when looking to make significant updates or changes. As a result, the GIS staff have migrated the original application to a COTS Esri solution, which enables greater autonomy.

"Right from the start," says Thome, "the greatest challenge has been people, not technology—getting the right business processes in place and ensuring that data remains fresh as it is added to the various GIS layers."

Using Active Directory, a landing page was created with viewers for four different divisions—the LAPP, engineering, real estate, and environmental management. Each requires its own functionalities and security settings, and POLA’s Planning Division will be the next to be onboarded.

geoPOLA, the port’s GIS solution, primarily serves an internal community. Various dashboards built by staff to support multiple port divisions include Port Navigator (for use by the Engineering Division), Live Traffic, Port Leases, Goods Movement (for tracking/counting TEUs), Traffic and Plan (which shows expansion and changes to internal road layouts), Environmental Hazmat (which shows where different hazardous materials are within the port/what needs to happen to remediate the land for future use),

the General geoPOLA viewer for all employees at the port to view GIS data, Vessel and Traffic Data (which enables a fast look at real-time positions), TEU Counts (enabling a look at annual TEUs and total imports/exports), and a live-cam feed of the port’s main channel (which also feeds in via EarthCam).
 

An exception to geoPOLA’s employee-only nature is LA Fleet Week. Hosted annually, this is a huge, multiday celebration of the nation’s military services, which is spread across two of the port’s locations—the Outer Harbor, where participating ships are moored, and the World Cruise Center, where various public events take place. An internal dashboard was created to support the LAPP with tactical planning. At the same time, a second dashboard was created. This dashboard enables access by external agencies—the Los Angeles Police Department, various branches of the military, the US Coast Guard, and so on—without having to deal with the issue of firewalls.

A two-person team cannot hope to remain current on all port changes. Thome admits that gaining information on changes or upcoming events can be difficult. Often, the first she or Tsai sees of new construction is when driving around the port’s facilities.

Even news of major events can arrive at second hand. For instance, the Vincent Thomas Bridge, a principal means of access to POLA for containerized cargo, is planned to be closed for resurfacing for the first time in its near 60-year history. As even a minor incident on the bridge can cause major congestion in and up to the port, this is big news. Yet, Thome and Tsai learned of the pending closure through social media due to it being a California Department of Transportation project. A solution has been to identify and appoint ‘super-users’.

Thome explains, “For resource reasons, we must make sure that responsibility for all GIS updates doesn’t fall on us. Those with responsibility for what’s happening need to update data themselves, or else it needs to somehow happen automatically. In the case of commercially sensitive changes within some of the terminals, we exist on a ‘handshake’ arrangement where we trust that the data we’re supplied with is reliable."
 

Often, real change can be the result of generational change. As older staff members and their ways of working retire, there is the opportunity to expand GIS into other and new areas. Thome has been diligent about identifying new opportunities based on staff turnover, system/business changes and identifying the suitable moment for intervention. Her efforts over many years mean that POLA is now enjoying the benefits of a more widespread recognition that data is a corporate resource, with support from POLA’s new CIO, the LAPP’s Chief of Police, and divisional executives. Nevertheless, there remains much work to be done, she says.

“We have a legacy situation where, because so much work was done on a project-by-project basis, data exists but in piles of CDs and thumb drives. In some cases, engineering never even received the as-built drawings from consultants and, 20 years up the road, people are realizing that, that just doesn’t work. We are starting to see the information pulling through from within the individual divisions, though. Engineering, for example, is now patching together substructure information and then layering on building information and figuring out what happened and where. It’s still very much about having that human element come along with the technology.”
 

Quiet, persistent evangelizing and expansion of the system continue to be the primary focus, but Thome’s and Tsai’s is a tightrope existence. On the one hand, getting GIS onto executives’ radars and garnering support is important. On the other, too much success in promotion and then under-delivering on requests because of a lack of resources could be damaging.

“I’ve realized that we need to pick the things that we can win—create the things that are consumable and focused on goals,” Thome says.
 

Even with support, there remains the challenge in terms of gaining funding and resources for proving what GIS does, and how it can make or save money.

“We can illustrate this,” Thome continues. “For example, the port is currently going through the process of transferring its financials into the cloud. We can offer to show things on a map; ‘Wouldn’t you like to be able to click on something and see what we’ve spent on it and how the money’s coming in?’”

The COTS nature of the current Esri solution is one of the biggest advantages in this regard.

“There are so many layers of information in geoPOLA, but we have the ability to give people what are, pretty much, their own personal viewers. We can create something that does just one task—which, when an individual logs in, pops up with personalized data on top. They can then turn that on and off as they need, and we can work with them to develop more functionalities.”

Ultimately, geoPOLA saves time. Historically, for example, to find lease information would mean calling someone. It meant waiting until the right person was in the office, and for them to locate and respond with the right data. All that has been replaced with clicking on a map.

“So, we’re time saving and dollar saving,” says Thome, “and even with relatively limited resources, we can give people across a large and diverse organization the domain awareness that they need.” And in a fast-changing environment like the Port of LA, keeping the GIS aligned with the port’s needs is a full-time endeavor.