Getting Started with Digital Transformation Using ArcGIS: A Guide for Small and Rural Water Utilities

Maps have always been essential to understanding and improving the delivery of safe, clean drinking water and reliable sewer and stormwater services. An early example you may be familiar with is the 1854 cholera outbreak in London. Then, Dr. John Snow used maps to trace the cholera source to the Broad Street pump, which enabled authorities to take the contaminated well out of service and stop the outbreak. Today, water utilities continue to use maps to meet a wide variety of challenges related to issues such as regulatory compliance, water quality, aging infrastructure, and the loss of staff members' expertise upon retirement.

Today, with modern advances in technology, such as improved internet connectivity and more powerful mobile devices, digital mapping can be readily deployed at a utility and improve the efficiency of workflows across an organization. Despite the availability of all this technology, some small and rural water utilities continue to rely on paper maps and/or long out-of-date digital maps. This reliance makes it more difficult to overcome common industry challenges and costlier to operate, thus the need for digital transformation. The benefits of digital transformation are well-known—such as reducing operations costs, achieving more with less, making smarter asset management decisions, attaining better regulatory compliance, and having more satisfied customers.

Through this document, you will learn the following:

• How digital transformation benefits water utilities
• How to set up an ArcGIS Online mapping portal to store and share asset information
• How to quickly stage a water utility centric GIS at your organization
• How to add staff as users and assign appropriate privileges so that they can contribute to asset data and collaborate through maps and applications
• How GIS can be effectively utilized to resolve common business challenges

This guide will help you create the following through a GIS framework: a system of record for storing and managing assets; a system of engagement for enabling access to asset information on any device at any time; and a system of insight for analyzing information and making smarter, more informed decisions about asset management. To learn more, download the technical paper.