Tennessee GIS Team Migrates 72 Counties from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro

Counties can now access and edit property parcel information with the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury’s centralized database.

In Maury County, Tennessee—home to more than 100,000 people—Johnny Stephens, 72, has spent 22 years as the sole geographic information system (GIS) analyst mapping parcels for the county assessor’s office.

He had been using ArcGIS Desktop (ArcMap) for all of those years 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,” he told a colleague. He knew ArcMap, Esri’s reliable legacy software, inside and out.

Exactly two days after he made the switch to ArcGIS Pro in late 2023, he told the same colleague he had changed his mind. “I would not go back to ArcMap if you told me to,” he said.

Staff from TNCOT have proactively worked with 72 county assessor offices––who 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 GIS team inside TNCOT usually needed to peer inside the county’s local database. Often, that meant spending hours on the phone or driving as much as three hours from their Nashville office to troubleshoot in person. While it was possible to remotely access a person’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 them 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 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 not everyone would be ready for the change, TNCOT’s GIS leadership got to work.

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 accurate property information is collected. While some of Tennessee’s 95 counties have their own robust GIS departments that manage their mapping and spatial data analysis, 72 counties rely on support from TNCOT. That means TNCOT’s 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 any issue with a database, it had to be fixed by accessing it directly on the county’s computers. TNCOT needed more control over a central database that counties could still access to edit and update. 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 advisor through the Esri Advantage Program. That individual helped connect them to an Esri technical consultant to conduct a study of its IT architecture resources to understand how to redesign its infrastructure and workflows around ArcGIS Enterprise. In that thorough study, the 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 on board with using the modern enterprise geospatial platform designed for the future.

TNCOT started communicating with its counties early, as far back as 2022, giving presentations and providing demos 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 be the first to encounter and understand any issues. “We spent that year making big changes,” he said.

The second phase involved recruiting early adopters who received extra support as they identified any issues and suggested improvements.

“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. 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,” Mixon said.

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 their 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, more than a year before ArcMap is expected to no longer be supported by Esri, every county in Tennessee that had been using the software is already using ArcGIS Pro. Each county editor who does advanced editing to their data now signs in to TNCOT’s ArcGIS Enterprise portal to make those changes.

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 a 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 responsible for mapping more than 50,000 parcels.

With ArcGIS Pro, he’s already noticed a number of 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 6 to 7 hours, tops.

Now, when traversing a parcel, Stephens gets a digital CAD file from surveyors including the state’s plane coordinates so that, when imported into ArcGIS Pro, the property lines line up. 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 said. “They had no trouble converting.”

His advice to other longtime ArcMap users? “Just do it,” he said, calling ArcGIS Pro more efficient and a time-saver. “There’s no reason not to.”

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, using 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, it 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.”

Since migrating to ArcGIS Pro in 2023, Neil said he’s also tried the software’s included tools 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.

In addition to migrating their operations and the counties they work with to the ArcGIS Pro environment, TNCOT took the extra step of adding ArcGIS Monitor for easier troubleshooting. If their 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 those long travel days for fixes to be 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 they couldn’t devote time to before. Muzorewa is also excited to experiment with pretrained deep learning models for change detection so they can more quickly and easily identify what’s changed on a property, like a swimming pool or an addition.

“The time to do other things is always a great thing,” Muzorewa said.

Learn more about how you and your organization can migrate from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro.