Hi Brian,
You are on the right track. The LGIM is a data model designed to allow organizations to easily leverage our suite of maps and apps. As well as providing the fields required by the many maps and apps we've built on top of the LGIM (I'll come back to this later), we've included fields for the related data we thought most of our users would need, expecting that some modifications would be required on an organization-by-organization basis. ModelBuilder is a great tool to help with this.
As correctly detailed in your hypothetical situations:
- Your organization may have data to fill all of these fields, or it may not.
[INDENT]This is expected and OK. You are correct when you state that it is better to leave these empty fields in the LGIM.[/INDENT]
- Your organization's data may fit entirely within the structure of the LGIM, or you may have additional data you'd like to include.
[INDENT]This is also expected and OK. If you have a good business case for including this additional data, add the fields to the information model. If you think that this is information that other organizations would also like to have included, post it on ideas.arcgis.com. We are constantly evolving the data model to accommodate new applications, but also in response to user feedback on its structure.[/INDENT]
The one additional recommendation that I have is to drive your migration using the maps and apps that will be leveraged by your organization. The path we recommend to get started is to identify one or several of our maps and apps and begin your data migration as part of implementing these applications rather than undertaking the data migration to the full LGIM as a single massive project all on it's own. Once those apps are ready to go, find others that would benefit your organization, and repeat 🙂
-Allison