2005 Computerworld Honors Program

	Geographic Information Systems (GIS) CONRAIL Philadelphia, PA USA Year: 1995 Status: Laureate Category: Transportation Nominating Company: Arthur D. Little, Incorporated
	Conrail has adopted GIS and Global Positioning system technologies to develop a common framework to visualize and analyze disparate data for managing key functions ( rail infrastructure maintenance, real estate management, traffic flows, and new business development) and to provide a broader perspective for decision-making.
	By linking the railroad's own view of its geography with the external world's geographic views, Conrails evolving GIS is being designed to help meet two needs: 1.Better management of key internal functions such as infrastructure maintenance, real estate, traffic flows, emergency response, customer service, and new business development, and 2.Providing a broader perspective for decision-making by employees at all levels. GIS facilitates the transition of Conrail to an information based organization. With GIS, location becomes the context for development of strategies to maintain rail infrastructure, market the transportation services, manages assets, direct the use of limited capital resources, and operate the rail transportation network. Location/geography as the context of decision-making assists in the cost effective consideration of issues such a public safety, local economy, and compliance with the regulatory agencies. Public safety and regulatory compliance are ensured by maintaining a safe rail network for transportation, having appropriate safety measures for road crossings, and coordinating emergency response with local authorities. National security and national interest are supported by transporting military cargo safely, reliably and in a timely fashion, as was the case during the recent Middle-East war. Local economies are supported by serving the transportation needs of the local industries and encouraging new businesses to locate in the region in joint efforts with public and private economic development community. Public interest is better served with rail alternative against trucking for long distance haul to curtail highway congestion and air pollution caused by trucks. To make the benefits of GIS and its broad perspective available to employees at all levels throughout the corporation, Conrail is using commercially available software, three hardware platforms and several types of data. ARC/INFO and ARCView software of Environmental Systems Research Institute (ERSI) are used to customize GIS applications. The distributed computing environment of corporate GIS includes IBM mainframe system, SGI workstations and PCs. This entails working with different operating systems such as MVS/ESA, UNIX and WINDOWS respectively. It uses data from multimedia sources such as DBMS, ASCII Files, CAD Files, Digital Images, Raster/Vector Map Files, GPS Coordinate Field Data, and Aerial Photographs. GIS at Conrail is envisioned to grow in its role as an enable of cross-functional applications and multi-departmental coalitions, thereby reducing process cycle-time and improving assets utilization with reduced costs and higher productivity. On account of such a potential Conrail's GIS is becoming a reference model for the rail industry in the USA and abroad. This may help information sharing among various railroads to provide interline seamless transportation service across the USA to meet or exceed customers' expectations.
	GIS application has helped its user community. It has improved the quality of data, provided user-friendly system to maintain accurate data in a timely manner, and to visualize various corporate data with a geocontext. It has provided the mechanism to link different departments' locations related information with varying referencing schemes to analyze the relation among them such as the cost of track maintenance with tonnage hauled and revenue generated. The same internal information can also be related with external context such as County, ZIP Code, Area Census Location, Congressional District, and State. Some of the significant anticipated benefits are: 1.Opportunity to save about 10% of the $600M annual cost of track maintenance through improved planning and management of the rail infrastructure and, 2.Ability to use thousands of CAD maps of Conrails; Real Estate by geographically aligning them to relate Conrail's property with its neighbors, streets, and any other areas of public interest. The initial successful demonstration of GIS has resulted in Engineering Department's decision to have Global Positioning System (GPS) and digital imaging technologies incorporated under the corporate GIS to inventory the rail infrastructure and to manage its maintenance. This development enable the multimedia view of the rail network under the corporate GIS umbrella to additional departments such as Transportation, Risk Management, Customer Service, and Real estate in their respective functions and multidepartmental cross-functioning applications. Use of GIS is considered to exploit the cost savings opportunity to manage car movements of the other railroads and customers with the shortest route possible to save about 5-10% of the $100M annual cost. The corporate GIS will fundamentally improve the way employees perform their functions. It will enable them to share their data and process capabilities to be supportive of each others' requirements as internal customers so as a whole the Company can better serve its external customers. The solving working mechanism corporate culture supports the idea of empowerment and one point of contact at the line level to be ore responsive to the customers' requirements. The concept of sharing data and process capabilities can be extended to the key customers such as the fiber cable companies who use Conrails' right of way. This way minimize the risk of cutting the fiber cables inadvertently during the construction work which may cause widespread problems to public and commercial and non-commercial organizations. Many state and local agencies deal with their own location related information such as mapping state highway network, EPA sites, taking districts, and etc. in an isolated manner. Commercial organizations such as railroads, utilities, and financial institutes can collaborate with them and cost-effectively share each others' data and processes.
	Information technology at Conrail is viewed as an enabler of corporate strategies and re-engineering of core applications. GIS is considered to be a strategic infuriation technology that is consistent with the evolving corporate information technology infrastructure. GIS technology is being incorporated for the first time at Conrail. GIS has been around for many years but until recently information technology was inadequate to exploit its true power to link disparate data using standardized location referencing scheme. Application software and graphical user interface were not user-friendly. Data conversion and data collection were enormously expensive and time consuming. Hardware could not process large geographic data cost effectively. Conrails' GIS derives the benefits of the recent advances in the information technology that has made software more versatile and user-friendly; hardware more powerful and cost-effective; disparate data linkage more economical, more easy and more useful; and communications network manageable. The main thrust of corporate wide GIS implementation plan is to leverage all the existing resources such as mainframe and PC hardware, disparate and isolated departmental data, and information processes that support the on going operations of the company. The implementation strategy has been to link various internal and external data using location as the common framework. In essence, one may consider Conrail's GIS as General Information System containing location information to meet both operational and management needs. Conrail's GIs computing environment is a client/sever type. Mainframe system in GIS is treated as an efficient corporate data file server. Networked PCs with the "Windows" are the main hardware for bringing GIS in an end user client/server computing environment. Some of the PCs are converted to X-terminal to use the information processing power and graphical capabilities of SGI workstations. SGI workstations are relatively new to Conrail's computing environment. They are the primary data processing units for GIS. The current GIS system configuration includes several categories of SGI workstations. Challenge L model is a dedicated GIS file server, Crimson model is used as a data processing server, and three Indigo models along with seven INdy models are deployed for dual roles as clients for power users and as servers in general. GIS software selection was done first to ensure that it can manipulate multitude of data in various formats and be flexible to work in any industry standard hardware including mainframe, workstation, and PC. The software of choice turned out to be ARC/INFO and ARCView of ESRI. In addition it provided full compatibility with many external data to relate railroad's internal geography with the public domain geography covering customers data, ZIP Code data, county data, congressional data, road network data, and many government created and supplied data such as "TIGER" ( Topographical Integrated Geographic and Referencing system) files. Above all the most significant benefit was to be able to the Rail Garrison Data provided by the US Air Force. It included ARC/INFO compatible geographically coded all the major rail-lines for the entire country. This amounted to significant savings in time (may be 2 years) and data conversion costs (may be $2-3M).
	GIS is a long established technology but its adoption at Conrail is of pioneering nature. It uses location as the common framework for accessing, linking, managing, visualizing, and analyzing disparate data from inside and outside the company. It is developed with a belief that the true power of GIS can only be realized when it becomes an enterprise system meeting needs of several departments in a cohesive manner. It is developed as an "information navigation tool" to access and manipulate multimedia information. It is end-user friendly and interactive for making ad-hoc queries and in this role does not require any expertise in geography or GIS software to use it. In the rail industry it is regarded as the forefront of GIS initiatives. Conrail's GIS was recommended by a team of Information Systems consultants to be one of the backbone systems of the company's enhanced applications architecture supporting Critical Success Factors (CSF's). CSF s are the goals that must be met for a company to be successful. GIS was also regarded as a fundamental information solution tool by a Corporate Data Quality Task Force Team.
	The GIS application is evolving and it has exceeded the expectations in terms of its potential to be useful. It is progressively becoming more operational. At the current rate of development the present scope of Applications will take about 3 more years to complete. Several people will eventually use GIS as part of their functional role in various departments such as Engineering, Real Estate, Risk Management, Corporate Strategy, Performance and Process Management, and Service Groups which market and manage Conrail's transportation services. The users will include employees at all levels of the organization. In the ultimate sense, Conrail's GIS will become a desktop accessible information navigation system for display and analysis to meet operational and management needs.
	The foremost obstacle was to make employees at all levels of the organization recognize that data is a corporate asset and needs to be managed and utilized accordingly. It required a paradigm shift to accept that if fact-based decisions and information-driven processes are integral to reengineering of business processes to reduce the operating costs then GIS offers an opportunity to interrelate internal and external disparate data using location as a common framework. Technical issues of GIS are demanding to implement networked client/server computing environment in a very heterogeneous and traditional IS environment. They require expertise in system integration and system re-engineering which we sought from the outside. Resource constraints are severe and forever. Cost justification required tangible, significant, and relatively soon benefits. Organizational issues are the real show stoppers. Political under currents, conflicting priorities, hidden agenda, and ever changing organization structure required senior management's sponsorship, willingness of key executives to nurture its growth by allocating critical resources and a GIS champion to articulate GIS solution and make a business case for its acceptance. Subsequently, project management and training issues become vital issues to be addressed properly. So far the GIS project has progressed in spite of all the challenges.