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NENA’s Standards and Best Practices (SBP) event felt less like a conference and more like a pressure test for the industry, and the turnout backed that up. SBP 2026 brought in 170 first-time attendees, strong sponsor participation across both SBP and the GIS Critical Issues Forum (CIF), and a noticeable shift in who showed up and why.

Customer agencies came ready to engage, not just observe, with state and local programs from across the country actively participating in sessions led by Richard Kelly, ENP, and other industry leaders.

We know that “NG9-1-1 readiness” doesn’t live in one lane. It spans 9-1-1 authorities, PSAP operations, GIS teams, telecom providers, and vendors. And this year – across discussions on i3 architecture, geospatial call routing, and interoperability – one theme kept resurfacing: standards only matter if the underlying GIS data is complete, consistent, and validated long before a 9-1-1 call ever hits the network.

What SBP made clear is that NG9-1-1 isn’t simply a one-time migration or a cleanup project. Rather, it’s a data transition program that must be managed over time, and at scale. Even after initial cutover, GIS data keeps evolving – addresses are added, roads change, and so do validation rules as i3, LVF, and state programs mature. 

The difficulty isn’t in understanding the standards but operationalizing them inside real GIS workflows while data continuously flows from contributors. Bottom line: it’s all about execution.

Let’s get into it.

Standards Are No Longer Theoretical

NENA standards are no longer academic exercises or future-state ideals, but are active requirements shaping how calls move across ESInets today. With the FCC’s NG9-1-1 transition rules now in force, originating service providers are already operating against deadlines. Public safety agencies may not be directly regulated, but the ecosystem pressure is real. If GIS data isn’t NENA-aligned, LVF-valid, and provisioned correctly, routing failures don’t stay hypothetical for long.

SBP speakers repeatedly emphasized that NG9-1-1 success depends on treating standards as operational guardrails, not documentation to skim after deployment. NENA i3, NENA-STA-006, CLDXF, and LVF consistency guidance now determine, in practice, whether a location is routable at all; and whether a 911 Authority can scale NG9-1-1 without constant intervention.

Geospatial Call Routing Raises the Stakes

One of the strongest takeaways from SBP 2026 was how geospatial call routing changes accountability. In legacy 9-1-1, selective routers and MSAGs absorbed a lot of data ambiguity. In NG9-1-1, ambiguity shows up immediately. If an address can’t be uniquely validated, it can’t be routed. If boundaries overlap or drift off course, calls don’t land where they belong.

Sessions exploring ECRF and LVF behavior reinforced an often-missed point: the GIS data a 9-1-1 authority provides defines what the system considers “valid.” Missing sub-address elements, misaligned boundaries, or inconsistent schemas help actively shape routing outcomes. That reality is why SBP conversations kept returning to governance, continuous validation, and enforceable rules inside daily GIS workflows. 

At scale, this is no longer manageable through ad hoc checks or after-the-fact fixes. Authorities need a way to apply shared rules, see failures early, and keep multiple data contributors aligned as conditions change. 

With 1Engage, standards are enforced inside the GIS environment, instead of treating compliance as something to be checked later. The 9-1-1 authority defines the rules once, and those rules become active guardrails inside ArcGIS Pro. Every address edit, boundary change, or schema update gets validated as it’s created. 1Engage makes this process explicit, so when a county submits an update, the system immediately shows whether it will pass LVF, where it fails, and why. This is also how scale becomes possible.

Operationally, 1Engage does three critical things at once: 

• It standardizes validation across all contributors, so “valid” means the same thing everywhere.
• It keeps analysts in their existing GIS workflows, which avoids retraining and resistance.
• And it creates continuous readiness, where data is always closer to routable, not periodically corrected.

Transitional Architectures Need Transitional Discipline

Another recurring theme was realism. Most agencies aren’t flipping a switch from legacy to i3 overnight, and NENA doesn’t expect them to. Legacy Selective Router Gateways, Legacy Network Gateways, and phased cutovers exist for a reason. But SBP sessions made it clear that transitional architectures only work when the data feeding them stays consistent across both worlds.

Validating civic addresses into CLDXF, enforcing LVF consistency before loading a LIS, and aligning update cycles with ECRF refresh schedules came up repeatedly as best practices that reduce cutover risk. Migration buys time, but it does not buy forgiveness. The data still has to be accurate and verified. Without continuous validation and shared rules applied across contributors, the data may drift at the boundary between legacy and NG9-1-1 systems.

This is where tools built for transition, not just the end-state, matter. 1Engage provides 9-1-1 authorities with a way to enforce the same validation rules across legacy and next-gen workflows. That means addresses can be checked against CLDXF requirements, LVF behavior can be validated before data ever reaches a LIS, and updates synchronized with ECRF refresh cycles, all without creating parallel processes or manual reconciliation.

Data Debt Is the Hidden Risk

SBP 2026 did not shy away from hard truths. Many GIS programs still carry years of accumulated data debt: inconsistent address formats, duplicated points, mismatched boundaries, and undocumented exceptions that “happened to work” in legacy systems.

NG9-1-1 exposes that debt immediately because it relies on data precision to function at all. The longer agencies delay standardization, the more expensive and disruptive reconciliation becomes as standards evolve and interoperability demands increase. What once required periodic cleanup now demands continuous control.

Several SBP sessions pointed to statewide and regional models where centrally governed rules and contributor self-validation reduced that burden dramatically. The shift was not about centralizing all the work, but about centralizing the rules. Contributors validated their own data against shared standards, and authorities gained visibility, auditability, and confidence without becoming a bottleneck. The message resonated because it reframed NG9-1-1 readiness as a repeatable, auditable process that keeps data usable as systems, contributors, and requirements change.

Why the Data Conversation Doesn’t End at SBP

If SBP 2026 clarified the “what” and the “why” of NG9-1-1 readiness, it also highlighted a widening execution gap. Many agencies understand the standards, but still struggle with execution at scale across multiple contributors at the pace NG9-1-1 demands. That’s where deeper guidance matters.

This is the space 1Spatial’s work, and 1Engage in particular, is designed to address. Rather than asking agencies to retool their environments or rely on periodic audits, 1Engage turns NENA guidance into repeatable rules inside ArcGIS Pro. As such, 9-1-1 authorities gain visibility and control without becoming a bottleneck for every update.

Our recent white paper, From Legacy to Lifesaving: A Guide to Geospatial Data Transformation for NG9-1-1 digs more into the operational reality behind the standards discussed at NENA. It walks through how geospatial call routing actually works, why LVF-validity becomes the gatekeeper for routing, and how agencies can move from manual QA to automated, rules-based validation without breaking existing workflows.

It also addresses the question SBP attendees asked repeatedly: how do you modernize data governance while keeping calls flowing during transition? For teams ready to move from standards discussion to practical execution, “From Legacy to Lifesaving” provides a roadmap that turns NENA guidance into repeatable workflows. It’s a natural next read for anyone who left SBP 2026 thinking less about architecture diagrams and more about whether their data is actually ready to route a call. Download it here.

Agencies that invest early in data governance and automation don’t just meet compliance timelines. They gain confidence that every call routes correctly, even when jurisdictions overlap, networks interconnect, or disasters stretch systems to their limits.

Because in NG9-1-1, the technology doesn’t decide where a call goes. The data does; and it has to be right every time.