Esri and Cityworks Upgrade Project
The City of Madison leverages multiple geospatial-enabled platforms to support the work performed by our dedicated staff. From looking up your trash collection schedule or finding the least stressful bike route through town, to maintaining critical public infrastructure, myriad City functions rely on our Esri Enterprise framework.
GIS in Local Government
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) interact with a wide range of technologies, allowing internal staff, contractors, and the public to visualize and conceptualize complex data. Our Esri Enterprise environment allows staff to create and publish maps and applications both internally and externally, facilitating the dissemination of this data and its integration with other vital platforms. One of these platforms is Trimble Cityworks- a GIS-based platform allowing for robust asset management. To ensure efficiency for the stakeholders and users of this technology, it has been pivotal to treat upgrading both Esri and Trimble Cityworks holistically, as many of their functionalities are intermeshed.
The Road So Far
For the past year we worked, in partnership with our vendor Timmons Group, to build the baseline technical infrastructure that will host our newly upgraded GIS and Cityworks environment. This has involved many hours of building and configuring new servers, configuring the future-state and parallel future state environments, and testing the new version of Cityworks. Project success so far has been a multi-tiered effort through the partnership of IT and the multiple stakeholder departments across the city.
Project Timeline
April 6 -12, 2026: Dependency Verification
April 13 – Forward, 2026: Governance and Communications
April 27 - May 15, 2026: SDE/Portal Testing (IT)
April 27 – May 11, 2026: Cityworks User Acceptance Testing
April 27 – May 20, 2026: Change Moratorium
May 12 – 19, 2026: Cutover Prep
May 18 – 20, 2026: Go-Live & Post Migration
New Go-Live Date: May 20th (after hours)
ESRI Licensing Delivery
Our licensing has been updated to reflect the City's new Enterprise Agreement with Esri.
- ArcGIS Online (Saas) = new licenses automatically applied
- ArcGIS Enterprise Portal (on-prem) = manual import (pending)
- ArcGIS Server Authorizations (on-prem) = manual import (pending)
Testing for Software and User Licensing
- We request that every department identify a team member to be their Cityworks/GIS Quality Assurance (QA) tester and perform testing with the new software and licensing. The goal is to mimic as closely as possible our post-upgrade environment and its compatibility with each department's workflows. The Cityworks/GIS QA Tester may experience interruptions in their work, such as broken database connections, versioning incompatibility, etc. This is expected during the discovery phase of testing, and the information gathered is vital to our testing process. Information Technology will work closely with testers to troubleshoot any issues that arise.
The Cityworks/GIS QA Tester:
- Will have ArcGIS Pro deployed on their machines (or an upgraded version if they are an existing Pro user).
- Will have a named user license assigned to them.
- Will understand their team/department's core GIS functions (including, but not limited to- SDE editing, attribute rules, etc.).
- May experience downtime during the discovery phase of testing.
Identify Your Cityworks/GIS QA Tester
By April 27, please email Sam Olivieri, IT GIS Technical Coordinator, the following information:
- Your department, tester name and contact information
Named User Licensing Assignments
Once your workflows are determined to be functional by your Cityworks/GIS QA Tester, your department will be scheduled for ArcGIS Pro deployments and named user licensing assignments.
Questions?
- For further information, please refer to the CItyworks and ESRI Enterprise Upgrade Project page.
- For questions on the QA tester role, directly reach out to Sam Olivieri, IT GIS Technical Coordinator
- For questions on the change moratorium, directly reach out to Dave Faust, Assistant IT Director
Additional Support
- Team business contacts are encouraged to submit a request for a GIS Consultation for department specific upgrade support (Request a GIS Consultation with the title 'ESRI_CW Upgrade Consult- [Department Name]').
- For time critical, high-impact issues (halting work for multiple users/teams) please submit a GIS Critical Issue Review (Request a GIS Critical Issue Review with the title 'ESRI_CW Critical Issue Review- [Department Name]') .