Counties Can Efficiently Edit Property Parcel Information in a Central Database
In Maury County, Tennessee—home to more than 100,000 people—Johnny Stephens has spent 22 years as the sole GIS analyst mapping parcels for the county assessor’s office.
He had been using ArcGIS Desktop (ArcMap) for most of his career when he first heard that the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury (TNCOT) wanted every county it worked with, including Maury County, to switch to ArcGIS Pro.
“Well, that’d be about time for me to retire,” Stephens, who is now 72 years old, told a colleague. He knew ArcMap inside and out.
Exactly two days after he made the switch to ArcGIS Pro in late 2023, he told the same colleague that he had changed his mind.
“I would not go back to ArcMap if you told me to,” he said.
Time for an Update
TNCOT staff have proactively worked with 72 county assessor’s offices—which have relied on ArcMap for more than two decades—to help them transition to the next chapter of trusted GIS technology.
The counties had been using ArcMap to update and edit GIS data in local databases, saved on their desktop computers. Each night, those databases were replicated through a geodata service, updating a version kept by the state. If there was an issue, the TNCOT GIS team usually had to peer inside the county’s local database. Often, that meant spending hours on the phone or driving as much as three hours from TNCOT’s Nashville office to troubleshoot in person. While it was possible to remotely access someone’s computer to help them through an issue, virtual troubleshooting could take more time than an in-person visit, depending on the issue and the authorizations needed.
ArcMap served TNCOT and all these counties well for many years, but it was time for an update. TNCOT needed a modern geospatial platform that would allow for better collaboration, communication, and productivity. Plus, the TNCOT team knew that GIS technology had evolved and that Esri support for ArcMap would come to an end by March 2026.
Years ahead of that date, TNCOT was well on its way to proactively developing a strategy for migrating its ArcMap users to ArcGIS Pro. Knowing that not everyone would be ready for the change, TNCOT’s GIS leadership got to work.
A Phased Approach to Migration
Property tax revenue is essential to local and state operations in Tennessee, which doesn’t collect income taxes. State comptroller offices like Tennessee’s keep track of where a state’s money is coming from and going to, conducting audits when necessary and working closely with county assessors to ensure that they have accurate property information.
While some of Tennessee’s 95 counties have their own robust GIS departments that manage their mapping and spatial data analyses, 72 counties rely on support from TNCOT. That means TNCOT’s GIS team manages the assessment data for some 2.1 million property parcels where 4.2 million people live.
“We spent a lot of time just making things work,” said Michael Mixon, TNCOT’s enterprise GIS administrator. “Often, you’re just maintaining, you’re treading water.”
Using ArcMap, counties maintained their databases locally on their physical desktop computers and replicated them daily to send to TNCOT. That meant that if there was ever an issue with a database, it had to be fixed directly on the county’s computers. TNCOT needed more control over a central database that counties could still access to provide edits and updates.
ArcGIS Enterprise offered that control with secure access by user types, as well as branch versioning capabilities. It also made it easy to update to the latest versions of the software.
TNCOT’s first step was to work with an Esri adviser through the Esri Advantage Program. That person helped connect the organization to an Esri technical consultant to conduct a study of TNCOT’s IT architecture resources to understand how to redesign its infrastructure and workflows around ArcGIS Enterprise. In that thorough study, TNCOT GIS staff determined how many processors and how much RAM they would need, in addition to how many users and editors they would be able to support at any given time.
The next step was developing a strategy with an adoption consultant from Esri to get counties on board with the replacement of ArcMap with ArcGIS Pro.
“The biggest challenge was the adversity of change,” Mixon said. “A lot of these counties were very happy with how their system worked.”
Mixon and others knew it would just take time and hands-on experience to get them to use ArcGIS Pro.
TNCOT started communicating with its counties early, as far back as 2022, giving presentations and providing demonstrations of ArcGIS Pro at assessor retreats.
“There was no surprise,” Mixon said. “We’ve been talking about it for years.”
For the actual migration, TNCOT spread it out over three phases, beginning by spending the first year migrating the technology and initially converting the data the department managed internally from its own office. This allowed Mixon and his team to encounter any issues first and then develop an understanding of them.
“We spent that year making big changes,” he said.
The second phase involved recruiting early adopters, who received extra support as they identified issues and suggested improvements.
A lot of time and resources were spent on educating the new users. That’s really the key to success for us.
“We let them know up front, ‘We have most of this figured out, but as long as you’re patient with us, we’ll provide you a lot of support.’ And so, we got buy-in that way,” Mixon recalled. “We promised them a lot of support, and they did a really good job at being gracious and allowing us to troubleshoot the problems with them.”
By the time TNCOT began the third phase—introducing ArcGIS Pro to everyone else—the counties “weren’t met with any problems,” Mixon said.
Throughout the process, TNCOT developed and offered its own manuals and training, hosting more than 20 in-person sessions across the state.
“A lot of time and resources were spent on educating the new users,” Mixon said. “That’s really the key to success for us.”
Now, less than a year before ArcMap is expected to no longer be supported by Esri, every county in Tennessee that had been reliant on the software is already using ArcGIS Pro. Each county editor who does advanced data editing now signs in to TNCOT’s ArcGIS Enterprise portal to make those changes.
Getting On Board with ArcGIS Pro
Stephens, the lone GIS analyst for the Maury County assessor’s office, began his career with paper maps 26 years ago. He’s driven by the goal of finding better ways to do his work.
“I never want to hit my ceiling,” he said.
He’s the only person in the county office to map more than 50,000 parcels.
With ArcGIS Pro, Stephens has already noticed that many time-consuming steps have been eliminated. He works 10-hour days, four days a week. Using ArcMap, mapping an 80-lot subdivision would have taken him a day and a half to finish, at least, he said. Now, the work takes him six to seven hours, tops.
When traversing a parcel, Stephens gets a digital computer-aided design (CAD) file from surveyors including the state’s plane coordinates so that, when imported into ArcGIS Pro, the property lines are aligned. Previously, there were multiple steps in between. Every day, he reconciles his work with an update to the state’s database in Nashville.
“It’s a lot quicker, cleaner, and more efficient,” he said.
Stephens became an advocate among adjacent counties, inviting their mappers to spend a few hours in ArcGIS Pro before they took a training course offered by the state.
“I’d let them drive,” Stephens recalled. “They had no trouble converting.”
His advice to other longtime ArcMap users who have yet to make the switch to ArcGIS Pro?
“Just do it,” he said, calling ArcGIS Pro more efficient and a time-saver. “There’s no reason not to.”
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A view of what parcels in Giles County, Tennessee, now appear as in ArcGIS Pro.
Jaxon Neil, for one, had no trepidation about the switch. Neil was elected in 2016 to be assessor of property for Lake County, serving approximately 7,500 people. At that time, the municipality of about 4,000 parcels was still making paper maps laid out on a light board as wide as two desks, tracing in red and highlighting in yellow. Neil earned a degree in surveying and mapping science and used ArcGIS Pro in his East Tennessee State University classrooms. But by the time the county agreed that the assessor’s office needed a technology upgrade, the county had invested in ArcMap—the same technology used by the rest of the state.
“Oh goodness, this is not as user-friendly,” Neil recalled thinking after going from learning ArcGIS Pro in school to using ArcMap as the assessor. As soon as he heard that TNCOT was interested in migrating, Neil volunteered his county to be among the first.
“I was relieved to get back to ArcGIS Pro,” he said.
Since migrating to ArcGIS Pro in 2023, Neil said he’s also tried the software’s included tools and apps such as ArcGIS Field Maps. Part of his job involves detecting property changes like a new home addition or a dilapidated building. In ArcMap, he would have to download PDFs of the property maps on his tablet and mark them up offline, then make those updates again in the office. Now, he downloads the parcel layer directly into Field Maps.
More Time for What They Do Best
On top of migrating its own operations and the counties that staff members work with to the ArcGIS Pro environment, TNCOT took the extra step of adding ArcGIS Monitor to its implementation for easier troubleshooting. If the server, for example, has reached its limit, TNCOT will get an alert.
The state agency also plans to implement the GIS Request Management solution from ArcGIS Solutions. GIS users across the state would be able to request support online through an ArcGIS Survey123 form that would be routed to an available expert analyst. The requests would also be used to collect data to better understand GIS support needs.
Mixon expects that for staff, those long travel days for fixes are behind them. And the hours-long troubleshooting phone calls?
“Those don’t happen anymore,” he said.
Mixon and TNCOT GIS manager TJ Muzorewa hope to spend any extra time now focusing on improving data integrity, as well as scripting and automation—creative work with ArcGIS that they couldn’t devote time to before. Muzorewa is also excited to experiment with pretrained deep learning models for change detection so that they can more quickly and easily identify what’s changed on a property, like the addition of a swimming pool or an accessory dwelling unit (ADU).
“The time to do other things is always a great thing,” Muzorewa said.
