Most utilities treat a move from Esri's Geometric Network to Utility Network as a GIS modernization effort. It is that, but if your integration strategy isn't treated with equal urgency, you will spend the months after go-live cleaning up problems that should have been designed away.Â
I've seen this pattern enough times to say it plainly: the migration milestone is not the finish line. Operational trust in your data is.Â
Done well, your integration strategy isn't just a safeguard. It's what determines whether this investment actually changes how your organization operates day to day.Â
Here are five things that should be non-negotiable in how you approach integration during a UN migration:Â
1. Audit your integrations before you design your migration. Every system that touches your GIS, OMS, SCADA, work management, CIS, was built on assumptions about how identifiers behave, how data is structured, and when it arrives. UN changes some of those assumptions. Know which integrations are affected before the project scope is set, not after go-live.Â
2. Treat synchronization as infrastructure, not a project task. Synchronization between systems doesn't get solved during migration. It has to be owned, governed, and maintained on an ongoing basis. Organizations that assign clear ownership here stay aligned. Those that don't find themselves rediscovering the same issues in a more modern architecture.Â
3. Define integration success criteria the same way you define data migration success criteria. If you have acceptance criteria for data quality, you need equivalent criteria for integration health. That means agreed-upon validation checkpoints, not informal spot-checks after go-live.Â
4. Include integration leads in cutover planning, not just system leads. Cutover sequencing decisions made in isolation by GIS teams often create cascading timing problems downstream. The people responsible for connected systems need a seat at the table when go-live timing and rollback scenarios are being defined.Â
5. Ask the six-month question before you go live. Six months after cutover, will your teams be able to trust the data coming out of your systems without manual reconciliation? If the honest answer is uncertain, that gap needs to be part of the project, not a post-launch cleanup effort.Â
Modernizing your network data model is the right move. But modernization that simply relocates friction rather than resolves it isn't the outcome your organization needs. Integration strategy deserves the same rigor as the migration itself.