Notes & signals from the network.
Field notes from the engineers moving utilities onto the Utility Network — plus the industry shifts, standards, and trends shaping where utility GIS is heading.
Connected and traceable: what''s actually included
We promise a connected and traceable Utility Network in weeks, and we keep being asked what those three words actually cover. It's more than most people expect: subnetwork controllers, network attributes, device terminals, connectivity rules, stacked points and missing junctions — every one of them a condition your legacy system never had to enforce. Here's the full list, and why remediating it is the single biggest driver of migration timelines.
What a Utility Network Migration Actually Costs (And What's Actually Yours to Control)
The honest breakdown of what an ArcGIS Utility Network migration really costs a utility your size — what's genuine spend, what you already own, and why most quotes price a solved problem as if it were a mystery.
Which Utility Network data model should you start with?
One of the most common questions we hear from electric utilities is: "Which data model should we start with?" The short answer is that it matters far less than you think. The Utility Network is a platform, the Foundation and partner packages are just configurations on top of it — and whichever you pick, you'll reshape it anyway. Here's how to choose the starting line without mistaking it for the finish.
Utility Network migrations are taking too long
Esri's materials suggest a 3–6 month Utility Network migration. In reality most utilities take 12–18 months, and the established partners are spending years per project. It may sound like a hot take, but it's really a simple math problem — and the math says something has to change. Here's the throughput gap, the complexity trap that created it, and the lens that gets you live in months instead of years.