Checking In with Energy Central Expert: Tom Coolidge, Director of Gas and Pipeline Industry Solutions at Esri

As the energy industry continues to navigate the challenges of digital transformation, few technologies have proven as foundational and far-reaching as geographic information systems (GIS). At the forefront of this evolution is Tom Coolidge, Director of Gas and Pipeline Industry Solutions at Esri, whose deep expertise and strategic insights have helped countless utilities harness the full potential of enterprise GIS. With over 16 years at Esri and a long track record of helping clients align cutting-edge geospatial tools with real-world operational needs, Tom returns for an annual check-in with the Energy Central community as a part of our Network of Experts to share what’s top of mind in today’s rapidly evolving utility landscape.

In this exclusive interview, Tom reflects on the major shifts he’s observed in the past year—from the rise of real-time GIS as a critical emergency response tool, to how utilities can finally break free from data silos and insight bottlenecks. As always, Tom’s perspective blends technical clarity with a practical understanding of the gas utility sector—making this a must-read for anyone charting the future of energy infrastructure.

Matt Chester: From your perspective, what is the role of enterprise GIS in today’s utility landscape, and how has that role evolved over the past decade?

Tom Coolidge: Enterprise GIS provides gas utilities with the capability to create, manage, analyze, and map data essential for workflows in all functional areas. Esri's ArcGIS is an enterprise GIS, a comprehensive geospatial platform that serves as a single source of truth for the entire gas utility or energy pipeline workforce, regardless of their location of work.

Enterprise GIS has evolved over the past decade to be a key corporate IT system, in part because C-suite officers increasingly have come to highly value the importance of location to their decision-making and activity management. Location is the most common attribute of virtually all gas utility data. Every asset, person, activity, and facet of life and work is somewhere. With the many IT advances of recent years and with more to come, an enterprise GIS allows gas utilities to work with a mirror digital representation of their buried pipe network, just as they would with the physical pipe network if they could.

MC: How would you differentiate between traditional GIS and real-time GIS? What new capabilities does real-time GIS unlock for utilities and pipeline operators?

TC: The need for real-time sharing of map-based data has always existed. Legacy systems, from vellum maps to printed paper maps to traditional GIS systems, have all failed to meet this core demand of time-critical information.

Take the example of a gas emergency with a gas-filled building. In this situation, the field technicians who respond to this life-threatening event cannot wait for a printer to create a map to identify the extent of the evacuation zone, much less wait for the office-generated map to be delivered to the field.  These emergency response workers need to be notified of this information before they arrive on-site.

Today’s real-time GIS systems, such as ArcGIS are built upon web services architecture. This is the same architecture that processes your credit card transactions at the store in a matter of seconds. This is the foundational capability that, combined with our cellular communication network, enables utilities to unlock real-time GIS.

MC: Utilities today are increasingly data-rich but insight-poor. How can enterprise GIS help bridge that gap?

TC: Enterprise GIS is well-positioned to make gas utilities smarter. Among the most enabling characteristics of an enterprise GIS is the capability to stack layers of authoritative and public data on a common geographic basis so a gas utility can visualize and analyze all data as if it were on one layer.

Typically, among the multiple layers stacked is a basemap and then a number of operational layers, most often including the service territory boundary, service center or depot boundaries, and network map. On top of these are additional layers that provide supplemental information needed for other applications or purposes. These layers are then "mashed" up, and the GIS can query or analyze them as a single map. This capability is a great force multiplier for gas utilities! And it gets even more powerful with the ever-growing range of analytic capabilities, including an evolving suite of capabilities powered by artificial intelligence.

MC: How do you advise utility leaders to approach enterprise GIS implementation—particularly in aligning it with broader digital transformation initiatives?

TC: Any gas utility leader today approaching an enterprise GIS implementation can look for tips from a growing number of peers who have successfully completed that initiative. I've heard many early adopters speak about their implementations, and these tips seem to be among the common threads. Enterprise GIS implementations don't need to be huge, multi-year projects from which no benefits can be realized until the very end. They can be implemented incrementally, and benefits can be realized along the way as increments are completed.

There is also now a substantial library of lessons learned from prior implementations. Take advantage of them. The keys to implementing a well-architected enterprise GIS – in alignment with the implementation of other enterprise systems part of any digital transformation initiative - are well known. There is no substitute for good planning!

MC: What are some of the key integration points between GIS and other enterprise systems (e.g., ADMS, EAM, SCADA), and how important are those connections in delivering value?

TC: A well-implemented, modern enterprise GIS is purposefully architected to integrate well with other IT and OT systems commonly found at the enterprise level. In gas utilities, some of the more common IT and OT systems to which enterprise GIS integrates are customer information systems (CIS), enterprise resource planning (ERP), imagery, sensor networks, and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems.

MC: In your experience, what are the biggest barriers—technical, organizational, or cultural—to fully leveraging enterprise GIS, and how can those be overcome?

TC: We live in a time of rapid technological change. As utility industry professionals we all see it and celebrate these advances in mobility computing, communication interoperability, and of course AI. The challenge is resetting our preconceived ideas on our workflows, and how our information should be organized. Failure to recalibrate our preconceived ideas creates the biggest barrier organizations face in fully utilizing the capabilities of today’s enterprise GIS.

Technical barriers of past GIS systems are rapidly falling. For instance, look at how natural gas organizations have historically segregated their subsystems (gathering, transmission, storage, distribution) into separate data silos. Today, those artificial barriers are gone and there can be a single representation of the entire pipe network that mirrors the real network from the wellhead to the customer meter. This removes the traditional barriers between industry subsystems that result in data silos. A single representation also enables users to work with that digital network just as they do with the real network. So, GIS technology is no longer a barrier as it once inadvertently was. Now, gas utilities with C-suite supportive leadership can rethink how they best use data in a geographic context to achieve their business objectives better. People are the key difference makers in this enterprise GIS era.

MC: Finally, how do you stay inspired and continue learning in such a fast-moving and data-driven field?

TC: If I've learned anything in all my years in this industry, it is that you have to be a passionate lifelong learner. That's the key to how I stay inspired and how I strive to stay on top of things. The pace of progress on all fronts today is greater than it's ever been, and the pace continues to accelerate. It's an exciting time for all in the industry, and the most rewarding ever for gas utilities that are taking advantage of what enterprise GIS can do for them. I enjoy nothing more than seeing the benefits gas utilities realize as they take advantage of the latest GIS technology has to offer them.

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Thanks to Tom for joining me for this interview and providing a wealth of insights and expertise to the Energy Central Community. You can trust that Tom will be available for you to reach out and connect and ask questions as an Energy Central member, so be sure to make him feel welcome when you see him across the platform.