At one time, when people asked Bruce Stauffer what he did, he would simply tell them he worked on maps with a computer.
Ashis Pal, left, and Bruce Stauffer, co-founders and partners in geographIT, bring up one of their com
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Ashis Pal, the president of geographIT, points out the color
coding that categorizes the use of prope
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That undersold the complexity of work
at geographIT, the company he and partner Ashis Pal co-founded in 1990, but it was a description people could understand.
But now, as people have become familiar with the Internet, Stauffer said, he is able to point to Google maps as a well-known example of a geographical information system, or GIS, to describe his line of work.
That still doesn't quite get at the complexity of geographIT's projects, but with public access to Web sites the firm has worked on for government agencies, Stauffer and Pal may one day be able to point to one of their own GIS projects as a well-known example.
"This technology is so new, we haven't even scratched the surface yet," said Pal, geographIT's president.
Located at 1525 Oregon Pike and known as Advanced Technology Solutions until about a year ago, when the name was changed to the more descriptive and distinctive geographIT, the company specializes in helping public entities, including most of the state agencies in Harrisburg and counties in southeastern Pennsylvania, set up geospatial computer programs.
These can be 911 dispatch systems, land-use mapping, transportation planning systems … and on and on.
"What makes this technology so exciting is there's always a new way for it to be applied," Stauffer said.
For example, geographIT has been developing a system for Bethlehem that maps the real-time location of the city's police cars using information from GPS units in the cars.
Quite a different project involved mapping flood scenarios downstream from North Carolina dams that the Nature Conservancy could use when evaluating and commenting on their relicensing applications.
Another company, HydroLogics, developed the water-release models, Stauffer said, and geographIT took those models and created maps to show the extent of possible floods, including the landforms and vegetation types that would be affected.
Logging on to
www.pastonearch.org provides a firsthand look at one of the company's projects for PennDOT.
The Web site has photographs and historic information on 124 stone-arch bridges in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties, along with the agency's regional management plan for the bridges.
In the beginningWhen Pal and Stauffer started the business, geospatial technology was in its infancy.
Pal, who is from India and did his undergraduate work at Jadavpore University, has master's degrees in civil engineering and management from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and got into computers while working for large corporations in this country.
Stauffer, who grew up in Africa the son of missionaries, is a cartographer with degrees in geography from Clarion and Syracuse universities.
"Early on, I always loved maps," Stauffer said. "Dad had a map out all the time when he was planning his travels in the bush."
There was no GIS when he was a college student, Stauffer said, although research was being done on computer mapping using mainframe computers.
"From my perspective, I've been hugely blessed that I studied something when it was still in its research phase and was just starting to be applied as technology," he said.
Ten years later, when Stauffer and Pal started geographIT, there were just two other companies in Pennsylvania that offered GIS services.
"Now, you find it everywhere," Stauffer said.
Many of their clients in those early days are still clients today. The firm did a project for Bucks County in 1990 and then more work there two years ago. It also helped Lancaster County set up its first GIS system.
"We still work with them as they go along," Pal said.
In some instances, geographIT will write custom GIS software for its clients. In others, it will set up systems using standard GIS software.
Part of the work, though, is in consulting on the best way to set up the human component of GIS systems.
"We will oftentimes get a call in when something is not working," Stauffer said. "Most of the time, the problem is not the technology."
Instead, there are organizational issues, such as staffing or skill levels, that are throwing up roadblocks, he said.
Clients that have never set up a GIS system also need a lot of help just figuring out where to get started.
"They know technology can solve their problems," Pal said, "but they don't know how to set up the organization or who to hire."
Pal said he usually recommends that a client new to GIS start with a small project and grow with it over time.
In some cases, geographIT will provide the personnel as well as the plan and software for the system.
"We've had people on site in some counties since 1993," Stauffer said.
Also, because GIS technology has shifted to browser-based software over the past three or four years, some clients chose to keep their systems on geographIT's servers and access the software through the Internet.
A growing companyAs the use of GIS software has grown, so has geographIT, earning the company a ranking of 3,728th on last year's Inc. 5000 list of the nation's fastest growing companies.
Five years ago, the firm had 14 employees, Pal said. Now it has 20. In the past year, revenue has grown 9.5 percent to $2.4 million in annual receipts, up from 8 percent growth the year before.
Nor is geographIT alone. The whole industry has now grown to the extent it has its own statewide association, the Pennsylvania Management Association for Private Photogrammetric Surveyors, or PA-MAPPS, which Pal helped set up less than a year ago and is now serving as president.
Stauffer said it's such a growth industry he doesn't foresee it being affected by the current economic downturn.
In fact, he said, the federal government has been funneling a lot of money into GIS programs at colleges and retraining centers for displaced workers.
"Our prospects look very good," Stauffer said.
Dennis Larison is editor of the Business section and can be reached by telephone at 291-8753 or by e-mail at dlarison@lnpnews.com.
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