Professional Services Open Meeting

On my third day of work, we had a share-out meeting with all of the Professional Services individuals working in the Denver office, which was open to the whole office. We had two guests with us for this meeting: Andy Schulte and Eric Floss. This was the perfect chance to get a broad scope of Professional Services operating out of the Denver office in my very first week, and I loved hearing about everyone’s projects, clients, and teams through Esri.

Aviation

The meeting opened with my manager for this summer, Will Reynolds, presenting about work with the aviation industry. He outlined the Esri initiatives making charts based on different standards and data unique to airports or divisions in the aviation industry. It was interesting to note that most charts for aviation are still printed, and so have to be constructed with print in mind. Work in this industry must accommodate many different sets of data, workflow, and specifications, which is still largely unstandardized across global locations.

Non-profit/NGOs

Sam Libby followed up Will with a succinct presentation about ArcGIS in the nonprofit setting. Excitingly, he opened his presentation with an update on the incorporation of Open Street Map data into more detailed layers in ArcGIS. It was also great to hear the significant discounts on ArcGIS available to nonprofits and NGOs.

Utilities/Mining

Following this presentation, we heard Will Chesser give a brief outline of work in the utilities and mining industry, where I began to wonder about one of the corporate acronyms new to me here at Esri (EEAP, which stands for Esri Enterprise Advantage Program). An interesting note from this short presentation covering a variety of work was that mining is generally an industry conservative on spending due to volatile commodities markets. I have a lot more to learn about how Esri interacts directly and indirectly with utilities and mining companies.

At this point, I think we ate pizza.

Transportation

Next, we heard an in-depth presentation from Eric on Esri’s work in the transportation sector, including local work with CDOT, the Colorado Department of Transportation. This, to me, sounds like one of the greatest areas of growth for Esri and ArcGIS. I can pretty easily grasp the necessity of using GIS and location data in developing public transit and other DOT needs. We heard a great account of a successful web application tracking snow removal for NYSDOT. This is a very exciting initiative to me.

Port of Rotterdam

Jeremy then went through a recap of work with the Port of Rotterdam. I had explored aspects of this project and Esri’s work with the Port of Rotterdam, but I was incredibly amazed with this discussion of scale. It is a MASSIVE port, with massive use of the ArcGIS platform. The Port of Rotterdam also seeks to be a fully autonomous port, which will be exciting to follow and develop IoT software for. I also liked hearing about the Geo Design integration of ArcGIS to balance efficiency, physical geography, and more. There was a short graphic of a map tracking tidal salinity changes in the port which got me very excited about this work, GIS, and my internship and work with this data visualization.

Operations

Amanda then shared details about Operations. It was great to hear that Esri provides Travel Security Assessments, of course including nice maps, for wherever staff members are sent for foreign work.

Web Development

Finally, Josh and Gary shared projects happening through our Web Development team. They shared updates about the IRWIN (Integrated Reporting of Wildland-fire INformation) project, which consolidates all incident reporting of wildland fire across the nation into an API. The map Josh showed displayed only points in its visualization, which was interesting to note, because most use of reporting data needs number of incidents for analysis. Additionally, Gary presented a new visualization for the US Census, and noted that front end visualization is becoming even more important than backend data organization as browsers’ visualization capabilities excel. The US Census has an ArcGIS backend, but thier front end must catch up to make the most engaging, visually appealing, and informative front end visualizations. Gary also shared work with a heavy machinery manufacturer for monitoring machines, which was crazy — I had never thought about the scale of machine monitoring and data collection.

Andy

Finally, Andy Schulte, who joined Esri a short 1.5 years ago, shared his fresh perspective on Esri organization. I took the following points away from his presentation the most:

• There must be discipline for small changes as well as large changes, or at least a way to capture effort expended for small changes to track them as they add up. I thought this point was interesting for it’s respect of time, and boundary setting, as small changes sum to large effort in any industry or work.
• Esri supports internal growth and role changes, which was mentioned in my internship onboarding. This sounds like it will increase personal growth throughout Esri.
• My favorite new term that Andy presented, that I had not heard of before, was “Lifelines framework.” Lifelines frameworks encompass personal and professional growth through different aspects of community leadership, including shadowing, coaching, and mentoring. I love this term for community education and growth.
• Andy also brought up “Knowledge management,” which is something I want to study and look into more.

Technical Consulting Program (TCP)

Jan finished off the presentations with a sketch of the Technical Consulting Program, which I find very intriguing.

Me!

Lastly, I capped off the meeting with a short presentation of my Story Map Introduction (see previous post), and felt closer with the team already!